On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 10:28:48AM -0700, Dan Williams wrote: > On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 8:57 AM Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 08:08:27AM -0700, Dan Williams wrote: > > > As far as I can see it's mostly check_heap_object() that is the > > > problem, so I'm open to finding a way to just bypass that sub-routine. > > > However, as far as I can see none of the other block / filesystem user > > > copy implementations submit to the hardened checks, like > > > bio_copy_from_iter(), and iov_iter_copy_from_user_atomic() . So, > > > either those need to grow additional checks, or the hardened copy > > > implementation is targeting single object copy use cases, not > > > necessarily block-I/O. Yes, Kees, please advise. > > > > The intention is mainly for copies that haven't had explicit bounds > > checking already performed on them, yes. Is there something getting > > checked out of the slab, or is it literally just the overhead of doing > > the "is this slab?" check that you're seeing? > > It's literally the overhead of "is this slab?" since it needs to go > retrieve the struct page and read that potentially cold cacheline. In > the case where that page is on memory media that is higher latency > than DRAM we get the ~37% performance loss that Jeff measured. Ah-ha! Okay, I understand now; thanks! > The path is via the filesystem ->write_iter() file operation. In the > DAX case the filesystem traps that path early, before submitting block > I/O, and routes it to the dax_iomap_actor() routine. That routine > validates that the logical file offset is within bounds of the file, > then it does a sector-to-pfn translation which validates that the > physical mapping is within bounds of the block device. > > It seems dax_iomap_actor() is not a path where we'd be worried about > needing hardened user copy checks. I would agree: I think the proposed patch makes sense. :) -- Kees Cook