Re: [PATCH 07/26] brcmsmac: reduce stack size with KASAN

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 10:16 AM, Arend Van Spriel
<arend.vanspriel@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 2-3-2017 17:38, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>> The wlc_phy_table_write_nphy/wlc_phy_table_read_nphy functions always put an object
>> on the stack, which will each require a redzone with KASAN and lead to possible
>> stack overflow:
>>
>> drivers/net/wireless/broadcom/brcm80211/brcmsmac/phy/phy_n.c: In function 'wlc_phy_workarounds_nphy':
>> drivers/net/wireless/broadcom/brcm80211/brcmsmac/phy/phy_n.c:17135:1: warning: the frame size of 6312 bytes is larger than 1000 bytes [-Wframe-larger-than=]
>
> Looks like this warning text ended up in the wrong commit message. Got
> me confused for a sec :-p

What's wrong about the warning?

>> This marks the two functions as noinline_for_kasan, avoiding the problem entirely.
>
> Frankly I seriously dislike annotating code for the sake of some
> (dynamic) memory analyzer. To me the whole thing seems rather
> unnecessary. If the code passes the 2048 stack limit without KASAN it
> would seem the limit with KASAN should be such that no warning is given.
> I suspect that it is rather difficult to predict the additional size of
> the instrumentation code and on some systems there might be a real issue
> with increased stack usage.

The frame sizes don't normally change that much. There are a couple of
drivers like brcmsmac that repeatedly call an inline function which has
a local variable that it passes by reference to an extern function.

While normally those variables share a stack location, KASAN forces
each instance to its own location and adds (in this case) 80 bytes of
redzone around it to detect out-of-bounds access.

While most drivers are fine with a 1500 byte warning limit, increasing
the limit to 7kb would silence brcmsmac (unless more registers
are accessed from wlc_phy_workarounds_nphy) but also risk a
stack overflow to go unnoticed.

    Arnd