Re: [PATCH v4 1/2] compiler, atomics: Provide READ_ONCE_NOKSAN()

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Fri Oct 16 2015 - 07:09:08 EST


On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 01:54:44PM +0300, Andrey Ryabinin wrote:
> On 10/16/2015 01:00 PM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 12:44:53PM +0300, Andrey Ryabinin wrote:
> >> Some code may perform racy by design memory reads. This could be
> >> harmless, yet such code may produce KASAN warnings.
> >>
> >> To hide such accesses from KASAN this patch introduces
> >> READ_ONCE_NOKSAN() macro. KASAN will not check the memory
> >> accessed by READ_ONCE_NOKSAN(). The KernelThreadSanitizer (KTSAN)
> >> is going to ignore it as well.
> >>
> >> This patch creates __read_once_size_noksan() a clone of
> >> __read_once_size(). The only difference between them is
> >> 'no_sanitized_address' attribute appended to '*_nokasan' function.
> >> This attribute tells the compiler that instrumentation of memory
> >> accesses should not be applied to that function. We declare it as
> >> static '__maybe_unsed' because GCC is not capable to inline such
> >> function: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=67368
> >>
> >> With KASAN=n READ_ONCE_NOKSAN() is just a clone of READ_ONCE().
> >
> > Would we need a similar annotation for things like
> > mutex_spin_on_owner()'s dereference of owner, or is that considered safe
> > by KASAN?
> >
> > (its not actually safe; as I remember we have a problem with using
> > rcu_read_lock for tasks like that)
> >
>
> How exactly it's not safe?

I was worried perhaps KASAN would trip over the speculative nature of
the owner pointer, but we do verify it, so I suppose its allright.

> If we could dereference freed owner, I'd say we need to fix this,
> but not hide.

We should, just not 'trivial' and we seem to get distracted while
thinking of possible fixes :/
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