Re: [PATCH v2 13/14] x86: runtime_const used for KASAN_SHADOW_END

[Andrey Konovalov <andreyknvl@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Feb 25, 2025 at 6:16 PM Maciej Wieczor-Retman
<maciej.wieczor-retman@intel.com> wrote:
>
> I mean in my tests, with setting offset in runtime, everything works correctly
> in inline mode. Even though hwasan-mapping-offset ends up empty and doesn't end
> up in CFLAGS_KASAN. I assume this means that the inline mode is pretty much the
> same as outline mode with the runtime offset setting?
>
> I also tested if hwasan-mapping-offset does anything if I passed random values
> to it by hardcoding them in the makefile and still everything seemed to work
> just fine. Therefore I assumed that this option doesn't have any effect on x86.

Hm that's weird. I wonder if inline instrumentation somehow gets auto-disabled.

> Hmm indeed it does. Then I'm not sure why I didn't crash when I started putting
> in random variables. I'll dive into assembly and see what's up in there.

Please do, I'm curious what's going on there.

> But anyway I have an idea how to setup the x86 offset for tag-based mode so it
> works for both paging modes. I did some testing and value
>         0xffeffc0000000000
> seems to work fine and has at least some of the benefits I was hoping for when
> doing the runtime_const thing. It works in both paging modes because in 5 levels
> it's just a little bit below the 0xffe0000000000000 that I was thinking about
> first and in 4 levels, because of LAM, it becomes 0xfffffc0000000000 (because in
> 4 level paging bits 62:48 are masked from address translation. So it's the same
> as the end of generic mode shadow memory space.
>
> The alignment doesn't fit the shadow memory size so it's not optimal but I'm not
> sure it can be if we want to have the inline mode and python scripts working at
> the same time. At the very least I think the KASAN_SHADOW_END won't collide with
> other things in the tab-based mode in 5 level paging mode, so no extra steps are
> needed (arch/x86/mm/kasan_init_64.c in kasan_init()).

What do you mean by "The alignment doesn't fit the shadow memory size"?

> Do you see any problems with this offset for x86 tag-based mode?

I don't, but I think someone who understands the x86 memory layout
better needs to look at this.

> Btw I think kasan_check_range() can be optimized on x86 if we use
> addr_has_metadata() that doesn't use KASAN_SHADOW_START. Getting rid of it from
> the implementation will remove pgtable_l5_enabled() which is pretty slow so
> kasan_check_range() which is called a lot would probably work much faster.
> Do you see any way in which addr_has_metadata() will make sense but won't use
> KASAN_SHADOW_START? Every one of my ideas ends up using pgtable_l5_enabled()
> because the metadata can have 6 or 15 bits depending on paging level.

What if we turn pgtable_l5_enabled() into using a read-only static key
(DEFINE_STATIC_KEY_FALSE_RO) instead of a bool variable? Or if that is
not acceptable, we could cache its value in a KASAN-specific static
key.