linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v2 0/5] slab cleanups

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Date:   Fri, 4 Mar 2022 14:11:50 +0100
From:   Marco Elver <elver@...gle.com>
To:     Hyeonggon Yoo <42.hyeyoo@...il.com>
Cc:     linux-mm@...ck.org, Christoph Lameter <cl@...ux.com>,
        Pekka Enberg <penberg@...nel.org>,
        David Rientjes <rientjes@...gle.com>,
        Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@....com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@...e.cz>,
        Matthew WilCox <willy@...radead.org>,
        Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@...ux.dev>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 0/5] slab cleanups

On Fri, 4 Mar 2022 at 13:02, Hyeonggon Yoo <42.hyeyoo@...il.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Mar 04, 2022 at 12:50:21PM +0100, Marco Elver wrote:
> > On Fri, 4 Mar 2022 at 07:34, Hyeonggon Yoo <42.hyeyoo@...il.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Changes from v1:
> > >         Now SLAB passes requests larger than order-1 page
> > >         to page allocator.
> > >
> > >         Adjusted comments from Matthew, Vlastimil, Rientjes.
> > >         Thank you for feedback!
> > >
> > >         BTW, I have no idea what __ksize() should return when an object that
> > >         is not allocated from slab is passed. both 0 and folio_size()
> > >         seems wrong to me.
> >
> > Didn't we say 0 would be the safer of the two options?
> > https://lkml.kernel.org/r/0e02416f-ef43-dc8a-9e8e-50ff63dd3c61@suse.cz
> >
>
> Oh sorry, I didn't understand why 0 was safer when I was reading it.
>
> Reading again, 0 is safer because kasan does not unpoison for
> wrongly passed object, right?

Not quite. KASAN can tell if something is wrong, i.e. invalid object.
Similarly, if you are able to tell if the passed pointer is not a
valid object some other way, you can do something better - namely,
return 0. The intuition here is that the caller has a pointer to an
invalid object, and wants to use ksize() to determine its size, and
most likely access all those bytes. Arguably, at that point the kernel
is already in a degrading state. But we can try to not let things get
worse by having ksize() return 0, in the hopes that it will stop
corrupting more memory. It won't work in all cases, but should avoid
things like "s = ksize(obj); touch_all_bytes(obj, s)" where the size
bounds the memory accessed corrupting random memory.

The other reason is that a caller could actually check the size, and
if 0, do something else. Few callers will do so, because nobody
expects that their code has a bug. :-)