Re: [RFCv2 00/10] Linear Address Masking enabling

Kirill A. Shutemov
2022-05-13T23:01:39Z

On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 01:07:43PM +0200, Alexander Potapenko wrote:
> On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 11:51 PM Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 5/12/22 12:39, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> > >> It's OK for a debugging build that runs on one kind of hardware. But,
> > >> if we want LAM-using binaries to be portable, we have to do something
> > >> different.
> > >>
> > >> One of the stated reasons for adding LAM hardware is that folks want to
> > >> use sanitizers outside of debugging environments. To me, that means
> > >> that LAM is something that the same binary might run with or without.
> > > On/off yes, but is there an actual use case where such a mechanism would
> > > at start time dynamically chose the number of bits?
> >
> > I'd love to hear from folks doing the userspace side of this. Will
> > userspace be saying: "Give me all the bits you can!". Or, will it
> > really just be looking for 6 bits only, and it doesn't care whether it
> > gets 6 or 15, it will use only 6?
>
> (speaking more or less on behalf of the userspace folks here)
> I think it is safe to assume that in the upcoming year or two HWASan
> will be fine having just 6 bits for the tags on x86 machines.
> We are interested in running it on kernels with and without
> CONFIG_X86_5LEVEL=y, so U48 is not an option in some cases anyway.

Just to be clear: LAM_U48 works on machine with 5-level paging enabled as
long as the process doesn't map anything above 47-bit.

--
Kirill A. Shutemov