On Tue, 26 Jun 2018 15:15:10 +0200 Andrey Konovalov [off-list ref] wrote:

This patchset adds a new mode to KASAN [1], which is called KHWASAN
(Kernel HardWare assisted Address SANitizer).

The plan is to implement HWASan [2] for the kernel with the incentive,
that it's going to have comparable to KASAN performance, but in the same
time consume much less memory, trading that off for somewhat imprecise
bug detection and being supported only for arm64.

Why do we consider this to be a worthwhile change?

Is KASAN's memory consumption actually a significant problem?  Some
data regarding that would be very useful.

If it is a large problem then we still have that problem on x86, so the
problem remains largely unsolved?

====== Benchmarks

The following numbers were collected on Odroid C2 board. Both KASAN and
KHWASAN were used in inline instrumentation mode.

Boot time [1]:
* ~1.7 sec for clean kernel
* ~5.0 sec for KASAN
* ~5.0 sec for KHWASAN

Slab memory usage after boot [2]:
* ~40 kb for clean kernel
* ~105 kb + 1/8th shadow ~= 118 kb for KASAN
* ~47 kb + 1/16th shadow ~= 50 kb for KHWASAN

Network performance [3]:
* 8.33 Gbits/sec for clean kernel
* 3.17 Gbits/sec for KASAN
* 2.85 Gbits/sec for KHWASAN

Note, that KHWASAN (compared to KASAN) doesn't require quarantine.

[1] Time before the ext4 driver is initialized.
[2] Measured as `cat /proc/meminfo | grep Slab`.
[3] Measured as `iperf -s & iperf -c 127.0.0.1 -t 30`.

The above doesn't actually demonstrate the whole point of the
patchset: to reduce KASAN's very high memory consumption?