Re: [PATCH 4/4] x86/percpu: Use C for percpu read/write accessors

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sun, 8 Oct 2023 at 13:13, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Your dump does end up being close to a %gs access:

Bah. I should have looked closer at the instructions before the oops.

Because I think that's exactly the problem here. That's the KASAN
checks that have been added, and we have this insane code:

>   10: 48 c7 c0 10 73 02 00 mov    $0x27310,%rax
>   17: 48 ba 00 00 00 00 00 movabs $0xdffffc0000000000,%rdx
>   1e: fc ff df
>   21: 48 c1 e8 03          shr    $0x3,%rax
>   25:* 80 3c 10 00          cmpb   $0x0,(%rax,%rdx,1) <-- trapping instruction

Look how both %rax and %rdx are constants, yet then gcc has generated
that crazy "shift a constant value right by three bits, and then use
an addressing mode to add it to another constant".

And that 0xdffffc0000000000 constant is KASAN_SHADOW_OFFSET.

So what I think is going on is trivial - and has nothing to do with ordering.

I think gcc is simply doing a KASAN check on a percpu address.

Which it shouldn't do, and didn't use to do because we did the access
using inline asm.

But now that gcc does the accesses as normal (albeit special address
space) memory accesses, the KASAN code triggers on them too, and it
all goes to hell in a handbasket very quickly.

End result: those percpu accessor functions need to disable any KASAN
checking or other sanitizer checking. Not on the percpu address,
because that's not a "real" address, it's obviously just the offset
from the segment register.

We have some other cases like that, see __read_once_word_nocheck().

And gcc should probably not have generated such code in the first
place, so arguably this is a bug with -fsanitize=kernel-address. How
does gcc handle the thread pointers with address sanitizer? Does it
convert them into real pointers first, and didn't realize that it
can't do it for __seg_gs?

               Linus