Re: eBPF verifier thoughts (Re: [PATCH v15 net-next 00/11] eBPF syscall, verifier, testsuite)

On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Andy Lutomirski [off-list ref] wrote:

On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 12:06 PM, David Miller [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

From: Alexei Starovoitov <redacted>
Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:16:56 -0700

quoted

v14 -> v15:
- got rid of macros with hidden control flow (suggested by David)
  replaced macro with explicit goto or return and simplified
  where possible (affected patches #9 and #10)
- rebased, retested

Series applied to net-next, thanks.

Hi all-

I read through the verifier.  Sorry this email is a little bit late.
Here are some thoughts, in no particular order.

Programs should IMO have feature flags.  One such feature would be
"can use pointers as integers", for example.

of course.
I believe we discussed it in the past.
programs will have flags. I'm not sure why you insist on this in
the first version.

UNKNOWN_VALUE is IMO a crappy type.  I think that it should renamed to
INTEGER and that a bunch of the things that generate it should be
errors.

it's an internal type.
Sure, I'm ok renaming it, but 'integer' name doesn't fit.
It's not integer type.
When I post a patch for "can use pointers as integers" flag
you'll see that this 'unknown_value' will be broken down
into more precise types.

ALU ops like adding two pointers should IMO be failures.  I don't
think that they should result in UNKNOWN_VALUE.

they will be failures for unprivileged programs.
In this patch the whole thing is for root only and root programs need
arithmetic on pointers to compute hashes and so on.
I wish we spent more time chatting, so I could explain this better.

I don't like PTR_TO_MAP_VALUE as a type.  I think that there should
instead be "pointer to (const?) buffer of N bytes".

ARG_PTR_TO_MAP_KEY is odd.  Why do we care what a function does with a
key?  It just needs to be a big enough buffer, right?

not quite. there is a distinction between key and value.
They both come from map definition and correspond to key_size
and value_size, so they have to have two different corresponding
_internal_ types 'ptr_to_map_key' and 'ptr_to_map_value'
This distinction is needed to properly describe function
arguments constraints.

All of the stack spill stuff seems overcomplicated.  Can you just
disallow unaligned stack access?  Right off the bat, that will delete
a bunch of code and cut down runtime memory use by nearly a factor of
eight.

not quite. stack spill/fill is not for unaligned access.
unaligned access is disallowed first.
See line 663 in check_mem_access().
Often enough gcc/llvm ran out of registers and have to spill
them into stack. This spill/fill tracking mechanism keeps
track of what is stored into stack. Otherwise type violation will be
possible. We cannot get rid of it. It essential for safety.

Also, there are no calls to functions written eBPF, right?  If so, why
not just give each stack slot a *fixed* type for the lifetime of the
program?  That would be a huge time complexity win, not to mention
being more comprehensible.  When function calls get added, they'll
need a whole pile of new infrastructure anyway.

you cannot. stack cannot be fixed. It's very small and valuable
resources. Programs will be using differently.

check_call is a mess.  I predict that it will be unmaintainable.

why? care to provide details?

check_ld_abs is messy, IMO.  Can't there be a real type "pointer to
object of type [type]", where skb would be a type?  Then you could use
the normal function call logic for skb pointers instead of hardcoded
crud.

You're doing a depth-first search.  I don't like it.  You need complex
pruning logic to avoid exponential behavior, and it's not obvious to

there was in patch in previous series that did the prunning.
I dropped out of this set to simplify things.

me that pathological programs that cause exponential blowups in the
verifier don't exist.  Wouldn't it make more sense to do a
breadth-first search instead and to give each reg/stack slot a
definite type at each point in the control flow?  You'd need a
function to find the intersection of two types, but I think that would
be preferable to the current code that tests whether one type is a
subset of another.

nope. breadth-first just doesn't work at all.

At some point someone will want loops, and that will open a huge can
of worms involving explicit typing or type inference.  It might pay to
add some kind of stack slot (and maybe even register slot) type
declarations now to get things ready for that.

sure. As discussed we may allow loops in the future.

NB: If this code is actually invoked in net-next when loading a
filter, please don't push to Linus until there's a convincing argument
that the verifier has acceptable asymptotic complexity.

complexity is actually described in the doc.
There are several limits. Verifier will be aborted if it walks
more then 32k instructions or more then 1k branches.
So the very worst case takes micro seconds to reject
the program. So I don't see your concern.