Tue, 15 Sep 2020 15:20:37 +0200 > From: Alexander Potapenko <glider@xxxxxxxxxx> > > This adds the Kernel Electric-Fence (KFENCE) infrastructure. KFENCE is a > low-overhead sampling-based memory safety error detector of heap > use-after-free, invalid-free, and out-of-bounds access errors. > > KFENCE is designed to be enabled in production kernels, and has near > zero performance overhead. Compared to KASAN, KFENCE trades performance > for precision. The main motivation behind KFENCE's design, is that with > enough total uptime KFENCE will detect bugs in code paths not typically > exercised by non-production test workloads. One way to quickly achieve a > large enough total uptime is when the tool is deployed across a large > fleet of machines. > > KFENCE objects each reside on a dedicated page, at either the left or > right page boundaries. The pages to the left and right of the object > page are "guard pages", whose attributes are changed to a protected > state, and cause page faults on any attempted access to them. Such page > faults are then intercepted by KFENCE, which handles the fault > gracefully by reporting a memory access error. To help understand the magic of KFENCE, a simple diagram looks needed to illustrate the relations between obj and guard pages, something like the below asiic chart. |-----------------|-----------------------------------|------------------| | left guard page | the page containing KFENCE object | right guard page | |-----------------|-----------------------------------|------------------|
