mm: avoid gcc complaint about pointer casting

The migration code ends up temporarily stashing information of the wrong
type in unused fields of the newly allocated destination folio.  That
all works fine, but gcc does complain about the pointer type mis-use:

    mm/migrate.c: In function ‘__migrate_folio_extract’:
    mm/migrate.c:1050:20: note: randstruct: casting between randomized structure pointer types (ssa): ‘struct anon_vma’ and ‘struct address_space’

     1050 |         *anon_vmap = (void *)dst->mapping;
          |         ~~~~~~~~~~~^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

and gcc is actually right to complain since it really doesn't understand
that this is a very temporary special case where this is ok.

This could be fixed in different ways by just obfuscating the assignment
sufficiently that gcc doesn't see what is going on, but the truly
"proper C" way to do this is by explicitly using a union.

Using unions for type conversions like this is normally hugely ugly and
syntactically nasty, but this really is one of the few cases where we
want to make it clear that we're not doing type conversion, we're really
re-using the value bit-for-bit just using another type.

IOW, this should not become a common pattern, but in this one case using
that odd union is probably the best way to document to the compiler what
is conceptually going on here.

[ Side note: there are valid cases where we convert pointers to other
  pointer types, notably the whole "folio vs page" situation, where the
  types actually have fundamental commonalities.

  The fact that the gcc note is limited to just randomized structures
  means that we don't see equivalent warnings for those cases, but it
  migth also mean that we miss other cases where we do play these kinds
  of dodgy games, and this kind of explicit conversion might be a good
  idea. ]

I verified that at least for an allmodconfig build on x86-64, this
generates the exact same code, apart from line numbers and assembler
comment changes.

Fixes: 64c8902ed441 ("migrate_pages: split unmap_and_move() to _unmap() and _move()")
Cc: Huang, Ying <ying.huang@intel.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

diff --git a/mm/migrate.c b/mm/migrate.c
index 37865f85df6d4132f5343aac33f16a580bf2f001..98f1c11197a8c5f057ed23f5aea9cdc62536bed4 100644 (file)
--- a/mm/migrate.c
+++ b/mm/migrate.c
@@ -1035,11 +1035,16 @@ out:
  * destination folio.  This is safe because nobody is using them
  * except us.
  */
+union migration_ptr {
+       struct anon_vma *anon_vma;
+       struct address_space *mapping;
+};
 static void __migrate_folio_record(struct folio *dst,
                                   unsigned long page_was_mapped,
                                   struct anon_vma *anon_vma)
 {
-       dst->mapping = (void *)anon_vma;
+       union migration_ptr ptr = { .anon_vma = anon_vma };
+       dst->mapping = ptr.mapping;
        dst->private = (void *)page_was_mapped;
 }
 
@@ -1047,7 +1052,8 @@ static void __migrate_folio_extract(struct folio *dst,
                                   int *page_was_mappedp,
                                   struct anon_vma **anon_vmap)
 {
-       *anon_vmap = (void *)dst->mapping;
+       union migration_ptr ptr = { .mapping = dst->mapping };
+       *anon_vmap = ptr.anon_vma;
        *page_was_mappedp = (unsigned long)dst->private;
        dst->mapping = NULL;
        dst->private = NULL;