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kasan: various fixes in documentation
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Signed-off-by: Andrey Konovalov <andreyknvl@google.com>
Cc: Andrey Ryabinin <ryabinin.a.a@gmail.com>
Cc: Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@google.com>
Cc: Alexander Potapenko <glider@google.com>
Cc: Konstantin Serebryany <kcc@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
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xairy authored and sfrothwell committed Oct 15, 2015
1 parent 336b6ba commit 6a631b1
Showing 1 changed file with 22 additions and 21 deletions.
43 changes: 22 additions & 21 deletions Documentation/kasan.txt
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Kernel address sanitizer
================
KernelAddressSanitizer (KASAN)
==============================

0. Overview
===========

Kernel Address sanitizer (KASan) is a dynamic memory error detector. It provides
KernelAddressSANitizer (KASAN) is a dynamic memory error detector. It provides
a fast and comprehensive solution for finding use-after-free and out-of-bounds
bugs.

KASan uses compile-time instrumentation for checking every memory access,
therefore you will need a gcc version of 4.9.2 or later. KASan could detect out
of bounds accesses to stack or global variables, but only if gcc 5.0 or later was
used to built the kernel.
KASAN uses compile-time instrumentation for checking every memory access,
therefore you will need a GCC version 4.9.2 or later. GCC 5.0 or later is
required for detection of out-of-bounds accesses to stack or global variables.

Currently KASan is supported only for x86_64 architecture and requires that the
kernel be built with the SLUB allocator.
Currently KASAN is supported only for x86_64 architecture and requires the
kernel to be built with the SLUB allocator.

1. Usage
=========
========

To enable KASAN configure kernel with:

CONFIG_KASAN = y

and choose between CONFIG_KASAN_OUTLINE and CONFIG_KASAN_INLINE. Outline/inline
is compiler instrumentation types. The former produces smaller binary the
latter is 1.1 - 2 times faster. Inline instrumentation requires a gcc version
of 5.0 or later.
and choose between CONFIG_KASAN_OUTLINE and CONFIG_KASAN_INLINE. Outline and
inline are compiler instrumentation types. The former produces smaller binary
the latter is 1.1 - 2 times faster. Inline instrumentation requires a GCC
version 5.0 or later.

Currently KASAN works only with the SLUB memory allocator.
For better bug detection and nicer report, enable CONFIG_STACKTRACE and put
Expand All @@ -42,7 +41,7 @@ similar to the following to the respective kernel Makefile:
KASAN_SANITIZE := n

1.1 Error reports
==========
=================

A typical out of bounds access report looks like this:

Expand Down Expand Up @@ -119,14 +118,16 @@ Memory state around the buggy address:
ffff8800693bc800: fb fb fb fb fb fb fb fb fb fb fb fb fb fb fb fb
==================================================================

First sections describe slub object where bad access happened.
See 'SLUB Debug output' section in Documentation/vm/slub.txt for details.
The header of the report discribe what kind of bug happend and what kind of
access caused it. It's followed by the description of the accessed slub object
(see 'SLUB Debug output' section in Documentation/vm/slub.txt for details) and
the description of the accessed memory page.

In the last section the report shows memory state around the accessed address.
Reading this part requires some more understanding of how KASAN works.
Reading this part requires some understanding of how KASAN works.

Each 8 bytes of memory are encoded in one shadow byte as accessible,
partially accessible, freed or they can be part of a redzone.
The state of each 8 aligned bytes of memory is encoded in one shadow byte.
Those 8 bytes can be accessible, partially accessible, freed or be a redzone.
We use the following encoding for each shadow byte: 0 means that all 8 bytes
of the corresponding memory region are accessible; number N (1 <= N <= 7) means
that the first N bytes are accessible, and other (8 - N) bytes are not;
Expand All @@ -139,7 +140,7 @@ the accessed address is partially accessible.


2. Implementation details
========================
=========================

From a high level, our approach to memory error detection is similar to that
of kmemcheck: use shadow memory to record whether each byte of memory is safe
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