Re: Making KASAN compatible with VMAP_STACK

[Dmitry Vyukov]

On Sun, Jul 22, 2018 at 7:52 PM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi all-
>
> It would be really nice to make KASAN compatible with VMAP_STACK.
> Both are valuable memory debugging features, and the fact that you
> can't use both is disappointing.
>
> As far as I know, there are only two problems:
>
> 1. The KASAN shadow population code is a mess, and adding *anything*
> to the KASAN shadow requires magical, fragile incantations.  It should
> be cleaned up so that ranges can be easily populated without needing
> to very carefully align things, call helpers in the right order, etc.
> The core KASAN code should figure it out by itself.
>
> 2. The vmalloc area is potentially extremely large.  It might be
> necessary to have a way to *depopulate* shadow space when stacks get
> freed or, more generally, when vmap areas are freed.  Ideally KASAN
> would integrate with the core vmalloc/vmap code and it would Just Work
> (tm).  And, as a bonus, we'd get proper KASAN protection of vmalloced
> memory.
>
> Any volunteers to fix this?

Hi Andy,

I understand that having most configs as orthogonal settings that can
be enabled independently is generally good in intself, but I would
like to understand what does VMAP_STACK add on top of KASAN in terms
of debugging capabilities?