linux-hardening - Re: [RFC PATCH 00/14] Prevent cross-cache attacks in the SLUB allocator

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Date:   Tue, 19 Sep 2023 08:56:30 -0700
From:   Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@...el.com>
To:     Matteo Rizzo <matteorizzo@...gle.com>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>
Cc:     "Lameter, Christopher" <cl@...amperecomputing.com>,
        penberg@...nel.org, rientjes@...gle.com, iamjoonsoo.kim@....com,
        akpm@...ux-foundation.org, vbabka@...e.cz,
        roman.gushchin@...ux.dev, 42.hyeyoo@...il.com,
        keescook@...omium.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-doc@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        linux-hardening@...r.kernel.org, tglx@...utronix.de,
        mingo@...hat.com, bp@...en8.de, dave.hansen@...ux.intel.com,
        x86@...nel.org, hpa@...or.com, corbet@....net, luto@...nel.org,
        peterz@...radead.org, jannh@...gle.com, evn@...gle.com,
        poprdi@...gle.com, jordyzomer@...gle.com,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 00/14] Prevent cross-cache attacks in the SLUB
 allocator

On 9/19/23 06:42, Matteo Rizzo wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Sept 2023 at 19:39, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org> wrote:
>> What's the split of the increase in overhead due to SLAB_VIRTUAL=y, between
>> user-space execution and kernel-space execution?
>>
> Same benchmark as before (compiling a kernel on a system running the patched
> kernel):

Thanks for running those.  One more situation that comes to mind is how
this will act under memory pressure.  Will some memory pressure make
contention on 'slub_kworker_lock' visible or make the global TLB flushes
less bearable?

In any case, none of this looks _catastrophic_.  It's surely a cost that
some folks will pay.

But I really do think it needs to be more dynamic.  There are a _couple_
of reasons for this.  If it's only a compile-time option, it's never
going to get turned on except for maybe ChromeOS and the datacenter
folks that are paranoid.  I suspect the distros will never turn it on.

A lot of questions get easier if you can disable/enable it at runtime.
For instance, what do you do if the virtual area fills up?  You _could_
just go back to handing out direct map addresses.  Less secure?  Yep.
But better than crashing (for some folks).

It also opens up the door to do this per-slab.  That alone would be a
handy debugging option.