Follow @Openwall on Twitter for new release announcements and other news
[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 11:42:35 -0700
From: Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net>
To: Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>, X86 ML <x86@...nel.org>, 
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>, linux-arch <linux-arch@...r.kernel.org>, 
	Borislav Petkov <bp@...en8.de>, Nadav Amit <nadav.amit@...il.com>, Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>, 
	Brian Gerst <brgerst@...il.com>, 
	"kernel-hardening@...ts.openwall.com" <kernel-hardening@...ts.openwall.com>, 
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>, Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@...hat.com>, 
	Jann Horn <jann@...jh.net>, Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@...ibm.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v5 14/32] x86/mm/64: Enable vmapped stacks

On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 12:53 AM, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org> wrote:
>
> * Andy Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org> wrote:
>
>> This allows x86_64 kernels to enable vmapped stacks.  There are a
>> couple of interesting bits.
>
>> --- a/arch/x86/Kconfig
>> +++ b/arch/x86/Kconfig
>> @@ -92,6 +92,7 @@ config X86
>>       select HAVE_ARCH_TRACEHOOK
>>       select HAVE_ARCH_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE
>>       select HAVE_EBPF_JIT                    if X86_64
>> +     select HAVE_ARCH_VMAP_STACK             if X86_64
>
> So what is the performance impact?

Seems to be a very slight speedup (0.5 µs or so) on my silly benchmark
(pthread_create, pthread_join in a loop).  It should be a small
slowdown on workloads that create many threads all at once, thus
defeating the stack cache.  It should be a *large* speedup on any
workload that would trigger compaction on clone() to satisfy the
high-order allocation.

>
> Because I think we should consider enabling this feature by default on x86 - but
> the way it's selected here it will be default-off.
>
> On the plus side: the debuggability and reliability improvements are real and
> making it harder for exploits to use kernel stack overflows is a nice bonus as
> well. There's two performance effects:

Agreed.  At the very least, I want to wait until after net-next gets
pulled to flip the default to y.  I'm also a bit concerned about more
random driver issues that I haven't found yet.  I suppose we could
flip the default to y for a few -rc releases and see what, if
anything, shakes loose.

--Andy

Powered by blists - more mailing lists

Confused about mailing lists and their use? Read about mailing lists on Wikipedia and check out these guidelines on proper formatting of your messages.