On 2/12/25 6:30 AM, Marco Elver wrote:
On Wed, 12 Feb 2025 at 06:57, Boqun Feng <boqun.feng@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[Cc KASAN]For completeness-sake, we'd also have to compare with
A Reviewed-by or Acked-by from KASAN would be nice, thanks!
Regards,
Boqun
On Sun, Feb 09, 2025 at 11:26:12PM -0500, Waiman Long wrote:
Both KASAN and LOCKDEP are commonly enabled in building a debug kernel.
Each of them can significantly slow down the speed of a debug kernel.
Enabling KASAN instrumentation of the LOCKDEP code will further slow
thing down.
Since LOCKDEP is a high overhead debugging tool, it will never get
enabled in a production kernel. The LOCKDEP code is also pretty mature
and is unlikely to get major changes. There is also a possibility of
recursion similar to KCSAN.
To evaluate the performance impact of disabling KASAN instrumentation
of lockdep.c, the time to do a parallel build of the Linux defconfig
kernel was used as the benchmark. Two x86-64 systems (Skylake & Zen 2)
and an arm64 system were used as test beds. Two sets of non-RT and RT
kernels with similar configurations except mainly CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT
were used for evaulation.
For the Skylake system:
Kernel Run time Sys time
------ -------- --------
Non-debug kernel (baseline) 0m47.642s 4m19.811s
Debug kernel 2m11.108s (x2.8) 38m20.467s (x8.9)
Debug kernel (patched) 1m49.602s (x2.3) 31m28.501s (x7.3)
Debug kernel
(patched + mitigations=off) 1m30.988s (x1.9) 26m41.993s (x6.2)
RT kernel (baseline) 0m54.871s 7m15.340s
RT debug kernel 6m07.151s (x6.7) 135m47.428s (x18.7)
RT debug kernel (patched) 3m42.434s (x4.1) 74m51.636s (x10.3)
RT debug kernel
(patched + mitigations=off) 2m40.383s (x2.9) 57m54.369s (x8.0)
For the Zen 2 system:
Kernel Run time Sys time
------ -------- --------
Non-debug kernel (baseline) 1m42.806s 39m48.714s
Debug kernel 4m04.524s (x2.4) 125m35.904s (x3.2)
Debug kernel (patched) 3m56.241s (x2.3) 127m22.378s (x3.2)
Debug kernel
(patched + mitigations=off) 2m38.157s (x1.5) 92m35.680s (x2.3)
RT kernel (baseline) 1m51.500s 14m56.322s
RT debug kernel 16m04.962s (x8.7) 244m36.463s (x16.4)
RT debug kernel (patched) 9m09.073s (x4.9) 129m28.439s (x8.7)
RT debug kernel
(patched + mitigations=off) 3m31.662s (x1.9) 51m01.391s (x3.4)
For the arm64 system:
Kernel Run time Sys time
------ -------- --------
Non-debug kernel (baseline) 1m56.844s 8m47.150s
Debug kernel 3m54.774s (x2.0) 92m30.098s (x10.5)
Debug kernel (patched) 3m32.429s (x1.8) 77m40.779s (x8.8)
RT kernel (baseline) 4m01.641s 18m16.777s
RT debug kernel 19m32.977s (x4.9) 304m23.965s (x16.7)
RT debug kernel (patched) 16m28.354s (x4.1) 234m18.149s (x12.8)
Turning the mitigations off doesn't seems to have any noticeable impact
on the performance of the arm64 system. So the mitigation=off entries
aren't included.
For the x86 CPUs, cpu mitigations has a much bigger impact on
performance, especially the RT debug kernel. The SRSO mitigation in
Zen 2 has an especially big impact on the debug kernel. It is also the
majority of the slowdown with mitigations on. It is because the patched
ret instruction slows down function returns. A lot of helper functions
that are normally compiled out or inlined may become real function
calls in the debug kernel. The KASAN instrumentation inserts a lot
of __asan_loadX*() and __kasan_check_read() function calls to memory
access portion of the code. The lockdep's __lock_acquire() function,
for instance, has 66 __asan_loadX*() and 6 __kasan_check_read() calls
added with KASAN instrumentation. Of course, the actual numbers may vary
depending on the compiler used and the exact version of the lockdep code.
CONFIG_KASAN_INLINE=y, which gets rid of the __asan_ calls (not the
explicit __kasan_ checks). But I leave it up to you - I'm aware it
results in slow-downs, too. ;-)