Re: [PATCH 00/15] kasan: x86: arm64: risc-v: KASAN tag-based mode for x86

[Jessica Clarke]

On 5 Feb 2025, at 18:51, Christoph Lameter (Ampere) <cl@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 4 Feb 2025, Jessica Clarke wrote:
> 
>> It’s not “no performance penalty”, there is a cost to tracking the MTE
>> tags for checking. In asynchronous (or asymmetric) mode that’s not too
> 
> 
> On Ampere Processor hardware there is no penalty since the logic is build
> into the usual read/write paths. This is by design. There may be on other
> platforms that cannot do this.

You helpfully cut out all the explanation of where the performance
penalty comes from. But if it’s as you say I can only assume your
design chooses to stall all stores until they have actually written, in
which case you have a performance cost compared with hardware that
omitted MTE or optimises for non-synchronous MTE. The literature on MTE
agrees that it is not no penalty (but can be low penalty). I don’t
really want to have some big debate here about the ins and outs of MTE,
it’s not the place for it, but I will stand up and point out that
claiming MTE to be “no performance penalty” is misrepresentative of the
truth

Jess