Re: Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer (KCSAN)

Joel Fernandes
2019-10-01T21:19:52Z

On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 04:18:57PM +0200, Marco Elver wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> We would like to share a new data-race detector for the Linux kernel:
> Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer (KCSAN) --
> https://github.com/google/ktsan/wiki/KCSAN (Details:
> https://github.com/google/ktsan/blob/kcsan/Documentation/dev-tools/kcsan.rst)
>
> To those of you who we mentioned at LPC that we're working on a
> watchpoint-based KTSAN inspired by DataCollider [1], this is it (we
> renamed it to KCSAN to avoid confusion with KTSAN).
> [1] http://usenix.org/legacy/events/osdi10/tech/full_papers/Erickson.pdf
>
> In the coming weeks we're planning to:
> * Set up a syzkaller instance.
> * Share the dashboard so that you can see the races that are found.
> * Attempt to send fixes for some races upstream (if you find that the
> kcsan-with-fixes branch contains an important fix, please feel free to
> point it out and we'll prioritize that).
>
> There are a few open questions:
> * The big one: most of the reported races are due to unmarked
> accesses; prioritization or pruning of races to focus initial efforts
> to fix races might be required. Comments on how best to proceed are
> welcome. We're aware that these are issues that have recently received
> attention in the context of the LKMM
> (https://lwn.net/Articles/793253/).
> * How/when to upstream KCSAN?

Looks exciting. I think based on our discussion at LPC, you mentioned
one way of pruning is if the compiler generated different code with _ONCE
annotations than what would have otherwise been generated. Is that still on
the table, for the purposing of pruning the reports?

Also appreciate a CC on future patches as well.

thanks,

- Joel

>
> Feel free to test and send feedback.
>
> Thanks,
> -- Marco