b5cb15d937
Enabling HARDENED_USERCOPY may cause measurable regressions in networking performance: up to 8% under UDP flood. I ran a small packet UDP flood using pktgen vs. a host b2b connected. On the receiver side the UDP packets are processed by a simple user space process that just reads and drops them: https://github.com/netoptimizer/network-testing/blob/master/src/udp_sink.c Not very useful from a functional PoV, but it helps to pin-point bottlenecks in the networking stack. When running a kernel with CONFIG_HARDENED_USERCOPY=y, I see a 5-8% regression in the receive tput, compared to the same kernel without this option enabled. With CONFIG_HARDENED_USERCOPY=y, perf shows ~6% of CPU time spent cumulatively in __check_object_size (~4%) and __virt_addr_valid (~2%). The call-chain is: __GI___libc_recvfrom entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe do_syscall_64 __x64_sys_recvfrom __sys_recvfrom inet_recvmsg udp_recvmsg __check_object_size udp_recvmsg() actually calls copy_to_iter() (inlined) and the latters calls check_copy_size() (again, inlined). A generic distro may want to enable HARDENED_USERCOPY in their default kernel config, but at the same time, such distro may want to be able to avoid the performance penalties in with the default configuration and disable the stricter check on a per-boot basis. This change adds a boot parameter that conditionally disables HARDENED_USERCOPY via "hardened_usercopy=off". Signed-off-by: Chris von Recklinghausen <crecklin@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.