Re: [PATCH v2 21/37] kasan: introduce CONFIG_KASAN_HW_TAGS

[Andrey Konovalov]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 5:36 PM Marco Elver <elver@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > > How about something like the below change (introduce KASAN_INSTRUMENTED
> > > Kconfig var) to avoid the repeated "KASAN_GENERIC || KASAN_SW_TAGS".
> > > This could then also be used in the various .c/.h files (and make some
> > > of the code more readable hopefully).
> >
> > I tried doing that initially, but it didn't really look good. The
> > reason is that we actually have two properties that are currently
> > common for the software modes, but aren't actually tied to each other:
> > instrumentation and shadow memory. Therefore we will end up with two
> > new configs: KASAN_INSTRUMENTED and KASAN_USES_SHADOW (or something),
> > and things get quite confusing. I think it's better to keep
> > KASAN_GENERIC || KASAN_SW_TAGS everywhere.
>
> Ah, I see. So in some cases the reason the #ifdef exists is because of
> instrumentation, in other cases because there is some shadow memory
> (right?).

Correct.

> The only other option I see is to call it what it is ("KASAN_SW" or
> "KASAN_SOFTWARE"), but other than that, I don't mind if it stays
> as-is.

Let's leave it as is then. I don't think the code will get much better
in terms of readability if we add KASAN_SOFTWARE, but we'll get
another "indirect" config option, which makes things a bit more
confusing.