On Thu, 2023-09-28 at 22:24 +0200, KP Singh wrote: > # Background > > LSM hooks (callbacks) are currently invoked as indirect function calls. These > callbacks are registered into a linked list at boot time as the order of the > LSMs can be configured on the kernel command line with the "lsm=" command line > parameter. > > Indirect function calls have a high overhead due to retpoline mitigation for > various speculative execution attacks. > > Retpolines remain relevant even with newer generation CPUs as recently > discovered speculative attacks, like Spectre BHB need Retpolines to mitigate > against branch history injection and still need to be used in combination with > newer mitigation features like eIBRS. > > This overhead is especially significant for the "bpf" LSM which allows the user > to implement LSM functionality with eBPF program. In order to facilitate this > the "bpf" LSM provides a default callback for all LSM hooks. When enabled, > the "bpf" LSM incurs an unnecessary / avoidable indirect call. This is > especially bad in OS hot paths (e.g. in the networking stack). > This overhead prevents the adoption of bpf LSM on performance critical > systems, and also, in general, slows down all LSMs. > > Since we know the address of the enabled LSM callbacks at compile time and only > the order is determined at boot time, the LSM framework can allocate static > calls for each of the possible LSM callbacks and these calls can be updated once > the order is determined at boot. > > This series is a respin of the RFC proposed by Paul Renauld (renauld@xxxxxxxxxx) > and Brendan Jackman (jackmanb@xxxxxxxxxx) [1] > > # Performance improvement > > With this patch-set some syscalls with lots of LSM hooks in their path > benefitted at an average of ~3% and I/O and Pipe based system calls benefitting > the most. > > Here are the results of the relevant Unixbench system benchmarks with BPF LSM > and SELinux enabled with default policies enabled with and without these > patches. > > Benchmark Delta(%): (+ is better) > =============================================================================== > Execl Throughput +1.9356 > File Write 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks +6.5953 > Pipe Throughput +9.5499 > Pipe-based Context Switching +3.0209 > Process Creation +2.3246 > Shell Scripts (1 concurrent) +1.4975 > System Call Overhead +2.7815 > System Benchmarks Index Score (Partial Only): +3.4859 FTR, I also measure a ~3% tput improvement in UDP stream test over loopback. @KP Singh, I would have appreciated being cc-ed here, since I provided feedback on a previous revision (as soon as I learned of this effort). Cheers, Paolo
