On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 10:05 AM, Christoph Lameter <c...@linux.com> wrote: > On Sun, 25 Jun 2017, Kees Cook wrote: > >> The difference gets lost in the noise, but if the above is sensible, >> it's 0.07% slower. ;) > > Hmmm... These differences add up. Also in a repetative benchmark like that > you do not see the impact that the additional cacheline use in the cpu > cache has on larger workloads. Those may be pushed over the edge of l1 or > l2 capacity at some point which then causes drastic regressions.
Even if that is true, it may be worth it to some people to have the protection. Given that is significantly hampers a large class of heap overflow attacks[1], I think it's an important change to have. I'm not suggesting this be on by default, it's cleanly behind CONFIG-controlled macros, and is very limited in scope. If you can Ack it we can let system builders decide if they want to risk a possible performance hit. I'm pretty sure most distros would like to have this protection. Thanks for looking it over! -Kees [1] http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/exploiting-linux-kernel-heap-corruptions-slub-allocator/ -- Kees Cook Pixel Security
