Re: [RFC PATCH 00/11] Kernel FineIBT Support

From: Joao Moreira
Date: Wed Apr 20 2022 - 18:50:24 EST


I think it'd be good to get kCFI landed in Clang first (since it is
effectively architecture agnostic), and then get FineIBT landed. But
that doesn't mean we can't be working on the kernel side of things at
the same time.

FWIIW, I'm effectively taking some time away from work for the next 3 months. I'll be around to answer this and that, help reviewing KCFI and maybe send small fixes around, but I'm not planning to land FineIBT in clang anytime before that (specially now that I have a direction to look into the linker approach as per the other thread e-mails). This should give KCFI the time it needs to squeeze in.


And just thinking generally, for other architecture-specific stuff,
I do wonder what an arm64 PAC-based CFI might look like. I prefer things
be hard-coded as kCFI is doing, but it'd be nice to be able to directly
measure performance and size overheads comparing the various methods.

There are other important bullets to this list, I think, like power consumption, robustness and collateral gains (like IBT's side-channel hardening). But yeah, this is probably a good list to keep in mind for us to discuss during plumbers :)