Re: [PATCH v5 18/21] arm64: Move "nokaslr" over to the early cpufeature infrastructure

[Ard Biesheuvel]

On Mon, 25 Jan 2021 at 15:28, Marc Zyngier <maz@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 2021-01-25 14:19, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> > On Mon, 25 Jan 2021 at 14:54, Marc Zyngier <maz@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 2021-01-25 12:54, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> >> > This struct now takes up
> >> > - ~100 bytes for the characters themselves (which btw are not emitted
> >> > into __initdata or __initconst)
> >> > - 6x8 bytes for the char pointers
> >> > - 6x24 bytes for the RELA relocations that annotate these pointers as
> >> > quantities that need to be relocated at boot (on a kernel built with
> >> > KASLR)
> >> >
> >> > I know it's only a drop in the ocean, but in this case, where the
> >> > struct is statically declared and defined only once, and in the same
> >> > place, we could easily turn this into
> >> >
> >> > static const struct {
> >> >    char alias[24];
> >> >    char param[20];
> >> > };
> >> >
> >> > and get rid of all the overhead. The only slightly annoying thing is
> >> > that the array sizes need to be kept in sync with the largest instance
> >> > appearing in the array, but this is easy when the struct type is
> >> > declared in the same place where its only instance is defined.
> >>
> >> Fair enough. I personally find the result butt-ugly, but I agree
> >> that it certainly saves some memory. Does the following work for
> >> you? I can even give symbolic names to the various constants (how
> >> generous of me! ;-).
> >>
> >
> > To be honest, I was anticipating more of a discussion, but this looks
> > reasonable to me.
>
> It looked like a reasonable ask: all the strings are completely useless
> once the kernel has booted, and I'm the first to moan that I can't boot
> an arm64 kernel with less than 60MB of RAM (OK, it's a pretty bloated
> kernel...).
>
> > Does 'char    feature[80];' really need 80 bytes though?
>
> It really needs 75 bytes, because of this:
>
>         { "arm64.nopauth",
>           "id_aa64isar1.gpi=0 id_aa64isar1.gpa=0 "
>           "id_aa64isar1.api=0 id_aa64isar1.apa=0"          },
>
> 80 is a round enough number.
>

Fair enough. This will inflate the struct substantially, but at least
it's all __initconst data now, and it's all NUL bytes so it compresses
much better than the pointers and RELA entries.