Subject: Re: [v6 11/15] arm64/kasan: explicitly zero kasan shadow memory

From: Will Deacon <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2017 13:30:43 +0100

On Tue, Aug 08, 2017 at 07:49:22AM -0400, Pasha Tatashin wrote:
> Hi Will,
> 
> Thank you for looking at this change. What you described was in my previous
> iterations of this project.
> 
> See for example here: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/5/5/369
> 
> I was asked to remove that flag, and only zero memory in place when needed.
> Overall the current approach is better everywhere else in the kernel, but it
> adds a little extra code to kasan initialization.

Damn, I actually prefer the flag :)

But actually, if you look at our implementation of vmemmap_populate, then we
have our own version of vmemmap_populate_basepages that terminates at the
pmd level anyway if ARM64_SWAPPER_USES_SECTION_MAPS. If there's resistance
to do this in the core code, then I'd be inclined to replace our
vmemmap_populate implementation in the arm64 code with a single version that
can terminate at either the PMD or the PTE level, and do zeroing if
required. We're already special-casing it, so we don't really lose anything
imo.

Will