Re: [PATCH 0/4] mm/kasan: make kasan=on|off work for all three modes

Andrey Ryabinin
2025-08-07T17:12:54Z

On 8/6/25 9:16 AM, Marco Elver wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Aug 2025 at 08:23, 'Baoquan He' via kasan-dev
> <kasan-dev@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>
>> Currently only hw_tags mode of kasan can be enabled or disabled with
>> kernel parameter kasan=on|off for built kernel. For kasan generic and
>> sw_tags mode, there's no way to disable them once kernel is built.
>> This is not convenient sometime, e.g in system kdump is configured.
>> When the 1st kernel has KASAN enabled and crash triggered to switch to
>> kdump kernel, the generic or sw_tags mode will cost much extra memory
>> for kasan shadow while in fact it's meaningless to have kasan in kdump
>> kernel.
>
> Are you using KASAN generic or SW-tags is production?
> If in a test environment, is the overhead of the kdump kernel really
> unacceptable?
>

kdump kernel operates with limited amount of memory, whatever was provided
in 'crashkernel=' for the primary kernel. So it's quite easily can ran out of memory.

By default kdump uses same as currently running kernel, but it can be configured
to use a different one.

At least in fedora it's in /etc/sysconfig/kdump:

$ cat /etc/sysconfig/kdump
# Kernel Version string for the -kdump kernel, such as 2.6.13-1544.FC5kdump
# If no version is specified, then the init script will try to find a
# kdump kernel with the same version number as the running kernel.
KDUMP_KERNELVER=""

>> So this patchset moves the kasan=on|off out of hw_tags scope and into
>> common code to make it visible in generic and sw_tags mode too. Then we
>> can add kasan=off in kdump kernel to reduce the unneeded meomry cost for
>> kasan.
>>
>> Test:
>> =====
>> I only took test on x86_64 for generic mode, and on arm64 for
>> generic, sw_tags and hw_tags mode. All of them works well.
>
> Does it also work for CONFIG_KASAN_INLINE?
>

I think it should. Because we don't initialize init_task.kasan_depth we always
bail out in kasan_report().