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* [PATCH 0/3] Allow default HARDENED_USERCOPY to be set at compile time
@ 2025-01-17 13:03 Mel Gorman
  2025-01-17 13:03 ` [PATCH 1/3] mm: security: Move hardened usercopy under 'Kernel hardening options' Mel Gorman
                   ` (3 more replies)
  0 siblings, 4 replies; 11+ messages in thread
From: Mel Gorman @ 2025-01-17 13:03 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Kees Cook; +Cc: Daniel Micay, linux-hardening, linux-kernel, Mel Gorman

Some hardening options like HARDENED_USERCOPY can be set at boot time
and have negligible cost when disabled. The default for options like
init_on_alloc= can be set at compile time but hardened usercopy is
enabled by default if built in. This incurs overhead when a kernel
wishes to provide optional hardening but the user does not necessarily
care.

Hardening is desirable in some environments but ideally they would be opt-in
by kernel command line as hardening is typically a deliberate decision
whereas the performance overhead is not always obvious to all users.
Patches 1 and 2 move HARDENED_USERCOPY to the Kconfig.hardening and
default it to disabled. Patch 3 moves FORTIFY_SOURCE to hardening only
because the option is related to hardening and happened to be declared
near HARDENED_USERCOPY.

Building HARDENED_USERCOPY but disabled at runtime has neligible effect
within the noise. Enabling the option by default generally incurs 2-10%
of overhead depending on the workload with some extreme outliers depending
on the exact CPU. While the benchmarks are somewhat synthetic, the overhead
IO-intensive and network-intensive is easily detectable but the root cause
may not be obvious (e.g. 2-14% overhead for netperf TCP_STREAM running
over localhost with different ranges depending on the CPU).


 .../admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt         |  4 ++-
 mm/usercopy.c                                 |  3 +-
 security/Kconfig                              | 21 ------------
 security/Kconfig.hardening                    | 33 +++++++++++++++++++
 4 files changed, 38 insertions(+), 23 deletions(-)

-- 
2.43.0


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2025-01-21 12:35 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 11+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2025-01-17 13:03 [PATCH 0/3] Allow default HARDENED_USERCOPY to be set at compile time Mel Gorman
2025-01-17 13:03 ` [PATCH 1/3] mm: security: Move hardened usercopy under 'Kernel hardening options' Mel Gorman
2025-01-20 21:10   ` Kees Cook
2025-01-21  9:21     ` Mel Gorman
2025-01-20 21:42   ` Paul Moore
2025-01-17 13:03 ` [PATCH 2/3] mm: security: Allow default HARDENED_USERCOPY to be set at compile time Mel Gorman
2025-01-20 21:21   ` Kees Cook
2025-01-21 12:35     ` Mel Gorman
2025-01-17 13:03 ` [PATCH 3/3] fortify: Move FORTIFY_SOURCE under 'Kernel hardening options' Mel Gorman
2025-01-20 21:25   ` Kees Cook
2025-01-20 21:08 ` [PATCH 0/3] Allow default HARDENED_USERCOPY to be set at compile time Kees Cook

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