Re: [PATCH v3 1/3] kasan: mark !__SANITIZE_ADDRESS__ stubs __always_inline

From: Peter Zijlstra

Date: Thu Dec 18 2025 - 04:25:43 EST


On Wed, Dec 17, 2025 at 01:53:33PM +0000, Brendan Jackman wrote:
> On Tue Dec 16, 2025 at 1:01 PM UTC, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 16, 2025 at 10:16:34AM +0000, Brendan Jackman wrote:
> >> The x86 instrumented bitops in
> >> include/asm-generic/bitops/instrumented-non-atomic.h are
> >> KASAN-instrumented via explicit calls to instrument_* functions from
> >> include/linux/instrumented.h.
> >>
> >> This bitops are used from noinstr code in __sev_es_nmi_complete(). This
> >> code avoids noinstr violations by disabling __SANITIZE_ADDRESS__ etc for
> >> the compilation unit.
> >
> > Yeah, so don't do that? That's why we use raw_atomic_*() in things like
> > smp_text_poke_int3_handler().
>
> Right, this was what Ard suggested in [0]:
>
> > For the short term, we could avoid this by using arch___set_bit()

arch_set_bit(), right?

> > directly in the SEV code that triggers this issue today. But for the
> > longer term, we should get write of those explicit calls to
> > instrumentation intrinsics, as this is fundamentally incompatible with
> > per-function overrides.
>
> But, I think the longer term solution is actually now coming from what
> Marco described in [1].

Oh, shiny. But yeah, that is *LONG* term, as in, we can't use that until
this future CLANG (and GCC?) version becomes the minimum version we
support for sanitizer builds.

> So in the meantime what's the cleanest fix? Going straight to the arch_*
> calls from SEV seems pretty yucky in its own right.

This is what I would do (and have done in the past):

14d3b376b6c3 ("x86/entry, cpumask: Provide non-instrumented variant of cpu_is_offline()")
f5c54f77b07b ("cpumask: Add a x86-specific cpumask_clear_cpu() helper")

Now, I don't have much to say about SEV; but given Boris did that second
patch above, I'm thinking he won't be objecting too much for doing
something similar in the SEV code.

> Adding special
> un-instrumented wrappers in bitops.h seems overblown for a temporary
> workaround.

Agreed.

> Meanwhile, disabling __SANITIZE_ADDRESS__ is something the
> SEV code already relies on as a workaround, so if we can just make that
> workaround work for this case too, it seems like a reasonable way
> forward?

I'll defer to Boris on that, this is his code I think.

> Anyway, I don't feel too strongly about this, I'm only pushing back
> for the sake of hysteresis since I already flipflopped a couple of times
> on this fix. If Ard/Marco agree with just using the arch_ functions
> directly I'd be fine with that.

Yeah, fair enough :-)

> And in the meantime, I guess patch 3/3 is OK?

I'm not sure, ISTR having yelled profanities at GCOV in general for
being just straight up broken. And people seem to insist on adding more
and more *COV variants and I keep yelling at them or something.

That is GCOV, KCOV and llvm-cov are all doing basically the same damn
thing (and sure, llvm-cov gets more edges but details) and we should not
be having 3 different damn interfaces for it. Also, they all should
bloody well respect noinstr and if they don't they're just broken and
all that :-)

That is, I'd as soon just make them all "depend BROKEN" and call it a
day.