Re: Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer (KCSAN)

Dmitry Vyukov
2019-10-03T13:14:13Z

On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 9:52 PM Marco Elver <elver@google.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Joel,
>
> On Tue, 1 Oct 2019 at 23:19, Joel Fernandes <joel@joelfernandes.org> wrote:
> >
> > 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?
>
> This might be interesting at first, but it's not entirely clear how
> feasible it is. It's also dangerous, because the real issue would be
> ignored. It may be that one compiler version on a particular
> architecture generates the same code, but any change in compiler or
> architecture and this would no longer be true. Let me know if you have
> any more ideas.
>
> Best,
> -- Marco
>
> > Also appreciate a CC on future patches as well.
> >
> > thanks,
> >
> > - Joel
> >
> >
> > >
> > > Feel free to test and send feedback.

FYI https://twitter.com/grsecurity/status/1179736828880048128 :)