kmalloc() is a frequently used primitive for the allocation of
small objects in the kernel. During the 2019
Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory Management Summit, Vlastimil
Babka led a session about the unexpected
alignment problems developers face when using this function. After a few
months he has come back with the second
version of a patch set implementing a natural alignment guarantee for
kmalloc(). From the strong opposition it faced
initially, it seemed that the change would not get accepted. However, it
ended up in Linus Torvalds’s tree. Let’s explore what happened.

Source: LWN.net – [$] Implementing alignment guarantees for kmalloc()