As Hardware Tag-Based KASAN is intended to be used in production, its
performance impact is crucial. As page_alloc allocations tend to be big,
tagging and checking all such allocations can introduce a significant
slowdown.
Add two new boot parameters that allow to alleviate that slowdown:
- kasan.page_alloc.sample, which makes Hardware Tag-Based KASAN tag only
every Nth page_alloc allocation with the order configured by the second
added parameter (default: tag every such allocation).
- kasan.page_alloc.sample.order, which makes sampling enabled by the first
parameter only affect page_alloc allocations with the order equal or
greater than the specified value (default: 3, see below).
The exact performance improvement caused by using the new parameters
depends on their values and the applied workload.
The chosen default value for kasan.page_alloc.sample.order is 3, which
matches both PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER and SKB_FRAG_PAGE_ORDER. This is
done for two reasons:
1. PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER is "the order at which allocations are deemed
costly to service", which corresponds to the idea that only large and
thus costly allocations are supposed to sampled.
2. One of the workloads targeted by this patch is a benchmark that sends
a large amount of data over a local loopback connection. Most multi-page
data allocations in the networking subsystem have the order of
SKB_FRAG_PAGE_ORDER (or PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER).
When running a local loopback test on a testing MTE-enabled device in sync
mode, enabling Hardware Tag-Based KASAN introduces a ~50% slowdown.
Applying this patch and setting kasan.page_alloc.sampling to a value
higher than 1 allows to lower the slowdown. The performance improvement
saturates around the sampling interval value of 10 with the default
sampling page order of 3. This lowers the slowdown to ~20%. The slowdown
in real scenarios involving the network will likely be better.
Enabling page_alloc sampling has a downside: KASAN misses bad accesses to
a page_alloc allocation that has not been tagged. This lowers the value
of KASAN as a security mitigation.
However, based on measuring the number of page_alloc allocations of
different orders during boot in a test build, sampling with the default
kasan.page_alloc.sample.order value affects only ~7% of allocations. The
rest ~93% of allocations are still checked deterministically.
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/129da0614123bb85ed4dd61ae30842b2dd7c903f.1671471846.git.andreyknvl@google.com
Signed-off-by: Andrey Konovalov <andreyknvl@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Marco Elver <elver@google.com>
Cc: Alexander Potapenko <glider@google.com>
Cc: Andrey Ryabinin <ryabinin.a.a@gmail.com>
Cc: Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@google.com>
Cc: Evgenii Stepanov <eugenis@google.com>
Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Cc: Mark Brand <markbrand@google.com>
Cc: Peter Collingbourne <pcc@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
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