32-bit Amlogic (ARM) SoC: kernel BUG in kfree()

[Martin Blumenstingl <martin.blumenstingl@googlemail.com>]

Hello,

I am experiencing the following crash:
  ------------[ cut here ]------------
  kernel BUG at mm/slub.c:3950!
  Internal error: Oops - BUG: 0 [#1] PREEMPT SMP ARM
  Modules linked in:
  CPU: 1 PID: 1 Comm: swapper/0 Not tainted
5.1.0-rc1-00080-g37b8cb064293-dirty #4252
  Hardware name: Amlogic Meson platform
  PC is at kfree+0x250/0x274
  LR is at meson_nfc_exec_op+0x3b0/0x408
  ...
my goal is to add support for the 32-bit Amlogic Meson SoCs (ARM
Cortex-A5 / Cortex-A9 cores) in the meson-nand driver.

I have traced this crash to the kfree() in meson_nfc_read_buf().
my observation is as follows:
- meson_nfc_read_buf() is called 7 times without any crash, the
kzalloc() call returns 0xe9e6c600 (virtual address) / 0x29e6c600
(physical address)
- the eight time meson_nfc_read_buf() is called kzalloc() call returns
0xee39a38b (virtual address) / 0x2e39a38b (physical address) and the
final kfree() crashes
- changing the size in the kzalloc() call from PER_INFO_BYTE (= 8) to
PAGE_SIZE works around that crash
- disabling the meson-nand driver makes my board boot just fine
- Liang has tested the unmodified code on a 64-bit Amlogic SoC (ARM
Cortex-A53 cores) and he doesn't see the crash there

in case the selected SLAB allocator is relevant:
  CONFIG_SLUB=y

the following printk statement is used to print the addresses returned
by the kzalloc() call in meson_nfc_read_buf():
  printk("%s 0x%px 0x%08x\n", __func__, info, virt_to_phys(info));

my questions are:
- why does kzalloc() return an unaligned address 0xee39a38b (virtual
address) / 0x2e39a38b (physical address)?
- how can further analyze this issue?
- (I don't know where to start analyzing: in mm/, arch/arm/mm, the
meson-nand driver seems to work fine on the 64-bit SoCs but that
doesn't fully rule it out, ...)


Regards
Martin