Re: [PATCH v2 11/20] kasan: add and integrate kasan boot parameters

[Marco Elver]

On Thu, 12 Nov 2020 at 12:35, Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 11:20:15PM +0100, Andrey Konovalov wrote:
> > Hardware tag-based KASAN mode is intended to eventually be used in
> > production as a security mitigation. Therefore there's a need for finer
> > control over KASAN features and for an existence of a kill switch.
> >
> > This change adds a few boot parameters for hardware tag-based KASAN that
> > allow to disable or otherwise control particular KASAN features.
> >
> > The features that can be controlled are:
> >
> > 1. Whether KASAN is enabled at all.
> > 2. Whether KASAN collects and saves alloc/free stacks.
> > 3. Whether KASAN panics on a detected bug or not.
> >
> > With this change a new boot parameter kasan.mode allows to choose one of
> > three main modes:
> >
> > - kasan.mode=off - KASAN is disabled, no tag checks are performed
> > - kasan.mode=prod - only essential production features are enabled
> > - kasan.mode=full - all KASAN features are enabled
>
> Alternative naming if we want to avoid "production" (in case someone
> considers MTE to be expensive in a production system):
>
> - kasan.mode=off
> - kasan.mode=on
> - kasan.mode=debug

I believe this was what it was in RFC, and we had a long discussion on
what might be the most intuitive options. Since KASAN is still a
debugging tool for the most part, an "on" mode might imply we get all
the debugging facilities of regular KASAN. However, this is not the
case and misleading. Hence, we decided to be more explicit and avoid
"on".

> Anyway, whatever you prefer is fine by me:
>
> Acked-by: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@xxxxxxx>