Re: [PATCH] mte: Follow arm64.nomte override in MMU setup.

Catalin Marinas
2022-08-16T09:31:43Z

On Tue, Aug 09, 2022 at 06:24:23PM -0700, Peter Collingbourne wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 9, 2022 at 10:29 AM Evgenii Stepanov <eugenis@google.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 9, 2022 at 9:49 AM Marc Zyngier <maz@kernel.org> wrote:
> > > In which case what is the tag memory doing in the linear map?
> > > Shouldn't it be marked as reserved, not mapped, and in general
> > > completely ignored by the NS OS?
> >
> > That would be wasteful. The idea is to only reserve the parts of the
> > tag memory that correspond to the TZ carveout and release the rest to
> > the NS OS.
>
> More generally, one can imagine a system where *any* tagged memory
> transaction can result in an SError because the MTE implementation was
> not configured by an earlier bootloader phase, e.g. because the
> bootloader was configured to disable MTE at runtime. On such systems,
> the kernel must refrain from causing tagged memory transactions to be
> issued via the linear map, and that's exactly what this patch does.

The problem is that it doesn't. The 8.5 architecture allows any Normal
Cacheable (even non-tagged) mapping to fetch tags. It may happen that on
certain implementations setting MAIR to non-tagged works but that's not
guaranteed and with the Linux kernel we tend to stick to the architected
behaviour (with a few exceptions like PMU counters and errata).

There is an ongoing discussion with the architects and partners on
whether we can tighten the architecture as not to cause visible
side-effects like SError but not sure whether that has been closed yet
(just back from holiday).

Until that's sorted, tag storage cannot be reused in an arm64-generic
way in the kernel.

--
Catalin