[PATCH v4 00/22] stackdepot: allow evicting stack traces

From: andrey . konovalov
Date: Mon Nov 20 2023 - 12:47:37 EST


From: Andrey Konovalov <andreyknvl@xxxxxxxxxx>

Currently, the stack depot grows indefinitely until it reaches its
capacity. Once that happens, the stack depot stops saving new stack
traces.

This creates a problem for using the stack depot for in-field testing
and in production.

For such uses, an ideal stack trace storage should:

1. Allow saving fresh stack traces on systems with a large uptime while
limiting the amount of memory used to store the traces;
2. Have a low performance impact.

Implementing #1 in the stack depot is impossible with the current
keep-forever approach. This series targets to address that. Issue #2 is
left to be addressed in a future series.

This series changes the stack depot implementation to allow evicting
unneeded stack traces from the stack depot. The users of the stack depot
can do that via new stack_depot_save_flags(STACK_DEPOT_FLAG_GET) and
stack_depot_put APIs.

Internal changes to the stack depot code include:

1. Storing stack traces in fixed-frame-sized slots (vs precisely-sized
slots in the current implementation); the slot size is controlled via
CONFIG_STACKDEPOT_MAX_FRAMES (default: 64 frames);
2. Keeping available slots in a freelist (vs keeping an offset to the next
free slot);
3. Using a read/write lock for synchronization (vs a lock-free approach
combined with a spinlock).

This series also integrates the eviction functionality into KASAN:
the tag-based modes evict stack traces when the corresponding entry
leaves the stack ring, and Generic KASAN evicts stack traces for objects
once those leave the quarantine.

With KASAN, despite wasting some space on rounding up the size of each
stack record, the total memory consumed by stack depot gets saturated due
to the eviction of irrelevant stack traces from the stack depot.

With the tag-based KASAN modes, the average total amount of memory used
for stack traces becomes ~0.5 MB (with the current default stack ring size
of 32k entries and the default CONFIG_STACKDEPOT_MAX_FRAMES of 64). With
Generic KASAN, the stack traces take up ~1 MB per 1 GB of RAM (as the
quarantine's size depends on the amount of RAM).

However, with KMSAN, the stack depot ends up using ~4x more memory per a
stack trace than before. Thus, for KMSAN, the stack depot capacity is
increased accordingly. KMSAN uses a lot of RAM for shadow memory anyway,
so the increased stack depot memory usage will not make a significant
difference.

Other users of the stack depot do not save stack traces as often as KASAN
and KMSAN. Thus, the increased memory usage is taken as an acceptable
trade-off. In the future, these other users can take advantage of the
eviction API to limit the memory waste.

There is no measurable boot time performance impact of these changes for
KASAN on x86-64. I haven't done any tests for arm64 modes (the stack
depot without performance optimizations is not suitable for intended use
of those anyway), but I expect a similar result. Obtaining and copying
stack trace frames when saving them into stack depot is what takes the
most time.

This series does not yet provide a way to configure the maximum size of
the stack depot externally (e.g. via a command-line parameter). This will
be added in a separate series, possibly together with the performance
improvement changes.

---

Changes v3->v4:
- Rebase onto 6.7-rc2.
- Fix lockdep annotation in depot_fetch_stack.
- New patch: "kasan: use stack_depot_put for Generic mode" (was sent for
review separately but now merged into this series).
- New patch: "lib/stackdepot: print disabled message only if truly
disabled" (was sent for review separately but now merged into this
series).
- New patch: "lib/stackdepot: adjust DEPOT_POOLS_CAP for KMSAN".

Changes v2->v3:
- Fix null-ptr-deref by using the proper number of entries for
initializing the stack table when alloc_large_system_hash()
auto-calculates the number (see patch #12).
- Keep STACKDEPOT/STACKDEPOT_ALWAYS_INIT Kconfig options not configurable
by users.
- Use lockdep_assert_held_read annotation in depot_fetch_stack.
- WARN_ON invalid flags in stack_depot_save_flags.
- Moved "../slab.h" include in mm/kasan/report_tags.c in the right patch.
- Various comment fixes.

Changes v1->v2:
- Rework API to stack_depot_save_flags(STACK_DEPOT_FLAG_GET) +
stack_depot_put.
- Add CONFIG_STACKDEPOT_MAX_FRAMES Kconfig option.
- Switch stack depot to using list_head's.
- Assorted minor changes, see the commit message for each path.

Andrey Konovalov (22):
lib/stackdepot: print disabled message only if truly disabled
lib/stackdepot: check disabled flag when fetching
lib/stackdepot: simplify __stack_depot_save
lib/stackdepot: drop valid bit from handles
lib/stackdepot: add depot_fetch_stack helper
lib/stackdepot: use fixed-sized slots for stack records
lib/stackdepot: fix and clean-up atomic annotations
lib/stackdepot: rework helpers for depot_alloc_stack
lib/stackdepot: rename next_pool_required to new_pool_required
lib/stackdepot: store next pool pointer in new_pool
lib/stackdepot: store free stack records in a freelist
lib/stackdepot: use read/write lock
lib/stackdepot: use list_head for stack record links
kmsan: use stack_depot_save instead of __stack_depot_save
lib/stackdepot, kasan: add flags to __stack_depot_save and rename
lib/stackdepot: add refcount for records
lib/stackdepot: allow users to evict stack traces
kasan: remove atomic accesses to stack ring entries
kasan: check object_size in kasan_complete_mode_report_info
kasan: use stack_depot_put for tag-based modes
kasan: use stack_depot_put for Generic mode
lib/stackdepot: adjust DEPOT_POOLS_CAP for KMSAN

include/linux/stackdepot.h | 59 ++++-
lib/Kconfig | 10 +
lib/stackdepot.c | 452 ++++++++++++++++++++++++-------------
mm/kasan/common.c | 8 +-
mm/kasan/generic.c | 27 ++-
mm/kasan/kasan.h | 2 +-
mm/kasan/quarantine.c | 26 ++-
mm/kasan/report_tags.c | 27 +--
mm/kasan/tags.c | 24 +-
mm/kmsan/core.c | 7 +-
10 files changed, 427 insertions(+), 215 deletions(-)

--
2.25.1