Re: [RFC PATCH v2 0/2] Randomization of address chosen by mmap.

Rich Felker
2018-03-28T00:00:25Z

On Tue, Mar 27, 2018 at 04:49:04PM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 27, 2018 at 03:53:53PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
> > I agree: pushing this off to libc leaves a lot of things unprotected.
> > I think this should live in the kernel. The question I have is about
> > making it maintainable/readable/etc.
> >
> > The state-of-the-art for ASLR is moving to finer granularity (over
> > just base-address offset), so I'd really like to see this supported in
> > the kernel. We'll be getting there for other things in the future, and
> > I'd like to have a working production example for researchers to
> > study, etc.
>
> One thing we need is to limit the fragmentation of this approach.
> Even on 64-bit systems, we can easily get into a situation where there isn't
> space to map a contiguous terabyte.

The default limit of only 65536 VMAs will also quickly come into play
if consecutive anon mmaps don't get merged. Of course this can be
raised, but it has significant resource and performance (fork) costs.

Rich