Re: [PATCH] [RESEND v2] structleak: disable STRUCTLEAK_BYREF in combination with KASAN_STACK

[Alexander Potapenko]

On Mon, Jul 22, 2019 at 4:26 PM Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jul 22, 2019 at 3:43 PM Alexander Potapenko <glider@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 22, 2019 at 1:41 PM Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > KASAN_STACK is currently implied by KASAN on gcc, but could be made a
> > > user selectable option if we want to allow combining (non-stack) KASAN
> > > with GCC_PLUGIN_STRUCTLEAK_BYREF.
> > >
> > > Note that it would be possible to specifically address the files that
> > > print the warning, but presumably the overall stack usage is still
> > > significantly higher than in other configurations, so this would not
> > > address the full problem.
> > >
> > > I could not test this with CONFIG_INIT_STACK_ALL, which may or may not
> > > suffer from a similar problem.
> > We would love to be able to run KASAN together with
> > CONFIG_INIT_STACK_ALL on syzbot, as this will potentially reduce the
> > number of flaky errors.
>
> Doesn't that just limit the usefulness of KASAN, as you no longer catch
> actual accesses to unintialized variables that KASAN is designed to find?
KASAN (unlike KMSAN) doesn't detect accesses to uninitialized variables.
It can of course detect bugs induced by e.g. treating an uninitialized
variable as a pointer or an array index.
Depending on the pattern used to initialize those variables, this can
indeed mask some bugs, but OTOH others will become more reproducible.

I'm not really sure KASAN+CONFIG_INIT_STACK_ALL is a problem right
now, will need to take a look.
> > Given that we already increase the stack size in KASAN builds, how big
> > of a problem are these warnings?
> > Perhaps it's better to disable them in this configuration, or push the limit up?
>
> I'm really hoping to lower the per-function limit for 'allmodconfig' builds,
> since both a high limit and lots of bogus warnings prevent us from
> noticing any newly introduced functions that use a lot of kernel stack
> without KASAN.
>
> An allmodconfig build (and ideally also any randconfig build) should always
> complete without warnings to be useful for compile testing.
>
>        Arnd



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Alexander Potapenko
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