Re: [PATCH v1 0/2] perf: Drop leaked kernel samples

Jin, Yao
2018-06-15T08:01:52Z

On 6/15/2018 3:45 PM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 15, 2018 at 06:03:21PM +0800, Jin Yao wrote:
>> On workloads that do a lot of kernel entry/exits we see kernel
>> samples, even though :u is specified. This is due to skid existing.
>>
>> This might be a security issue because it can leak kernel addresses even
>> though kernel sampling support is disabled.
>>
>> One patch "perf/core: Drop kernel samples even though :u is specified"
>> was posted in last year but it was reverted because it introduced a
>> regression issue that broke the rr-project.
>>
>> Now this patch set uses sysctl to control the dropping of leaked
>> kernel samples.
>
> So what happened to the suggestion of keeping the samples but 0-stuffing
> all the tricky bits?
>

Bring more overhead to kernel if we zero the bits considering the number
of leaked samples may be not too small?

And the skid information may be interesting (see example of hitting on
page_fault in previous mail). If we zero it, we will not know.

Thanks
Jin Yao