Skip to content
Commit 08f6b106 authored by Marco Elver's avatar Marco Elver Committed by Linus Torvalds
Browse files

kfence: limit currently covered allocations when pool nearly full

One of KFENCE's main design principles is that with increasing uptime,
allocation coverage increases sufficiently to detect previously
undetected bugs.

We have observed that frequent long-lived allocations of the same source
(e.g.  pagecache) tend to permanently fill up the KFENCE pool with
increasing system uptime, thus breaking the above requirement.  The
workaround thus far had been increasing the sample interval and/or
increasing the KFENCE pool size, but is no reliable solution.

To ensure diverse coverage of allocations, limit currently covered
allocations of the same source once pool utilization reaches 75%
(configurable via `kfence.skip_covered_thresh`) or above.  The effect is
retaining reasonable allocation coverage when the pool is close to full.

A side-effect is that this also limits frequent long-lived allocations
of the same source filling up the pool permanently.

Uniqueness of an allocation for coverage purposes is based on its
(partial) allocation stack trace (the source).  A Counting Bloom filter
is used to check if an allocation is covered; if the allocation is
currently covered, the allocation is skipped by KFENCE.

Testing was done using:

	(a) a synthetic workload that performs frequent long-lived
	    allocations (default config values; sample_interval=1;
	    num_objects=63), and

	(b) normal desktop workloads on an otherwise idle machine where
	    the problem was first reported after a few days of uptime
	    (default config values).

In both test cases the sampled allocation rate no longer drops to zero
at any point.  In the case of (b) we observe (after 2 days uptime) 15%
unique allocations in the pool, 77% pool utilization, with 20% "skipped
allocations (covered)".

[elver@google.com: simplify and just use hash_32(), use more random stack_hash_seed]
  Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/YU3MRGaCaJiYht5g@elver.google.com
[elver@google.com: fix 32 bit]

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210923104803.2620285-4-elver@google.com


Signed-off-by: default avatarMarco Elver <elver@google.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarDmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@google.com>
Acked-by: default avatarAlexander Potapenko <glider@google.com>
Cc: Aleksandr Nogikh <nogikh@google.com>
Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Cc: Taras Madan <tarasmadan@google.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
parent a9ab52bb
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment