Re: [PATCH v4 0/7] arm64: untag user pointers passed to the kernel

[Catalin Marinas]

Hi Andrey,

On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 02:47:50PM +0200, Andrey Konovalov wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 5:24 PM, Andrey Konovalov <andreyknvl@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > arm64 has a feature called Top Byte Ignore, which allows to embed pointer
> > tags into the top byte of each pointer. Userspace programs (such as
> > HWASan, a memory debugging tool [1]) might use this feature and pass
> > tagged user pointers to the kernel through syscalls or other interfaces.
> >
> > This patch makes a few of the kernel interfaces accept tagged user
> > pointers. The kernel is already able to handle user faults with tagged
> > pointers and has the untagged_addr macro, which this patchset reuses.
> >
> > We're not trying to cover all possible ways the kernel accepts user
> > pointers in one patchset, so this one should be considered as a start.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > [1] http://clang.llvm.org/docs/HardwareAssistedAddressSanitizerDesign.html
> 
> Is there anything I should do to move forward with this?
> 
> I've received zero replies to this patch set (v3 and v4) over the last
> month.

The patches in this series look fine but my concern is that they are not
sufficient and we don't have (yet?) a way to identify where such
annotations are required. You even say in patch 6 that this is "some
initial work for supporting non-zero address tags passed to the kernel".
Unfortunately, merging (or relaxing) an ABI without a clear picture is
not really feasible.

While I support this work, as a maintainer I'd like to understand
whether we'd be in a continuous chase of ABI breaks with every kernel
release or we have a better way to identify potential issues. Is there
any way to statically analyse conversions from __user ptr to long for
example? Or, could we get the compiler to do this for us?

Thanks.

-- 
Catalin