[PATCH v10 0/6] KASAN for powerpc64 radix

Daniel Axtens dja at axtens.net
Wed Feb 3 22:59:40 AEDT 2021


Building on the work of Christophe, Aneesh and Balbir, I've ported
KASAN to 64-bit Book3S kernels running on the Radix MMU.

v10 rebases on top of next-20210125, fixing things up to work on top
of the latest changes, and fixing some review comments from
Christophe. I have tested host and guest with 64k pages for this spin.

It does not apply to powerpc/next, sorry: there are conflicting kasan
changes staged in next.

There is now only 1 failing KUnit test: kasan_global_oob - gcc puts
the ASAN init code in a section called '.init_array'. Powerpc64 module
loading code goes through and _renames_ any section beginning with
'.init' to begin with '_init' in order to avoid some complexities
around our 24-bit indirect jumps. This means it renames '.init_array'
to '_init_array', and the generic module loading code then fails to
recognise the section as a constructor and thus doesn't run it. This
hack dates back to 2003 and so I'm not going to try to unpick it in
this series. (I suspect this may have previously worked if the code
ended up in .ctors rather than .init_array but I don't keep my old
binaries around so I have no real way of checking.)

(The previously failing stack tests are now skipped due to more
accurate configuration settings.)

Details from v9: This is a significant reworking of the previous
versions. Instead of the previous approach which supported inline
instrumentation, this series provides only outline instrumentation.

To get around the problem of accessing the shadow region inside code we run
with translations off (in 'real mode'), we we restrict checking to when
translations are enabled. This is done via a new hook in the kasan core and
by excluding larger quantites of arch code from instrumentation. The upside
is that we no longer require that you be able to specify the amount of
physically contiguous memory on the system at compile time. Hopefully this
is a better trade-off. More details in patch 6.

kexec works. Both 64k and 4k pages work. Running as a KVM host works, but
nothing in arch/powerpc/kvm is instrumented. It's also potentially a bit
fragile - if any real mode code paths call out to instrumented code, things
will go boom.

Kind regards,
Daniel


More information about the Linuxppc-dev mailing list