kernel/linux.git/mm/kfence, branch v6.12.80

mm/kfence: fix KASAN hardware tag faults during late enablement

2026-03-25T10:08:42+00:00

[ Upstream commit d155aab90fffa00f93cea1f107aef0a3d548b2ff ] When KASAN hardware tags are enabled, re-enabling KFENCE late (via /sys/module/kfence/parameters/sample_interval) causes KASAN faults. This happens because the KFENCE pool and metadata are allocated via the page allocator, which tags the memory, while KFENCE continues to access it using untagged pointers during initialization. Use __GFP_SKIP_KASAN for late KFENCE pool and metadata allocations to ensure the memory remains untagged, consistent with early allocations from memblock. To support this, add __GFP_SKIP_KASAN to the allowlist in __alloc_contig_verify_gfp_mask(). Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20260220144940.2779209-1-glider@google.com Fixes: 0ce20dd84089 ("mm: add Kernel Electric-Fence infrastructure") Signed-off-by: Alexander Potapenko Suggested-by: Ernesto Martinez Garcia Cc: Andrey Konovalov Cc: Andrey Ryabinin Cc: Dmitry Vyukov Cc: Greg KH Cc: Kees Cook Cc: Marco Elver Cc: Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

mm/kfence: disable KFENCE upon KASAN HW tags enablement

2026-03-25T10:08:33+00:00

commit 09833d99db36d74456a4d13eb29c32d56ff8f2b6 upstream. KFENCE does not currently support KASAN hardware tags. As a result, the two features are incompatible when enabled simultaneously. Given that MTE provides deterministic protection and KFENCE is a sampling-based debugging tool, prioritize the stronger hardware protections. Disable KFENCE initialization and free the pre-allocated pool if KASAN hardware tags are detected to ensure the system maintains the security guarantees provided by MTE. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20260213095410.1862978-1-glider@google.com Fixes: 0ce20dd84089 ("mm: add Kernel Electric-Fence infrastructure") Signed-off-by: Alexander Potapenko Suggested-by: Marco Elver Reviewed-by: Marco Elver Cc: Andrey Konovalov Cc: Andrey Ryabinin Cc: Dmitry Vyukov Cc: Ernesto Martinez Garcia Cc: Greg KH Cc: Kees Cook Cc: Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

mm/kfence: randomize the freelist on initialization

2026-02-06T15:55:49+00:00

commit 870ff19251bf3910dda7a7245da826924045fedd upstream. Randomize the KFENCE freelist during pool initialization to make allocation patterns less predictable. This is achieved by shuffling the order in which metadata objects are added to the freelist using get_random_u32_below(). Additionally, ensure the error path correctly calculates the address range to be reset if initialization fails, as the address increment logic has been moved to a separate loop. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20260120161510.3289089-1-pimyn@google.com Fixes: 0ce20dd84089 ("mm: add Kernel Electric-Fence infrastructure") Signed-off-by: Pimyn Girgis Reviewed-by: Alexander Potapenko Cc: Dmitry Vyukov Cc: Marco Elver Cc: Ernesto Martnez Garca Cc: Greg KH Cc: Kees Cook Cc: Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Pimyn Girgis Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

kfence: skip __GFP_THISNODE allocations on NUMA systems

2025-02-17T09:05:31+00:00

commit e64f81946adf68cd75e2207dd9a51668348a4af8 upstream. On NUMA systems, __GFP_THISNODE indicates that an allocation _must_ be on a particular node, and failure to allocate on the desired node will result in a failed allocation. Skip __GFP_THISNODE allocations if we are running on a NUMA system, since KFENCE can't guarantee which node its pool pages are allocated on. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250124120145.410066-1-elver@google.com Fixes: 236e9f153852 ("kfence: skip all GFP_ZONEMASK allocations") Signed-off-by: Marco Elver Reported-by: Vlastimil Babka Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka Cc: Christoph Lameter Cc: Alexander Potapenko Cc: Chistoph Lameter Cc: Dmitriy Vyukov Cc: Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

mm: kfence: fix elapsed time for allocated/freed track

2024-09-26T21:01:44+00:00

Fix elapsed time for the allocated/freed track introduced by commit 62e73fd85d7bf. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240924085004.75401-1-qiwu.chen@transsion.com Fixes: 62e73fd85d7b ("mm: kfence: print the elapsed time for allocated/freed track") Signed-off-by: qiwu.chen Reviewed-by: Marco Elver Cc: Alexander Potapenko Cc: Dmitry Vyukov Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton

kfence: save freeing stack trace at calling time instead of freeing time

2024-09-02T03:26:12+00:00

For kmem_cache with SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU, the freeing trace stack at calling kmem_cache_free() is more useful. While the following stack is meaningless and provides no help: freed by task 46 on cpu 0 at 656.840729s: rcu_do_batch+0x1ab/0x540 nocb_cb_wait+0x8f/0x260 rcu_nocb_cb_kthread+0x25/0x80 kthread+0xd2/0x100 ret_from_fork+0x34/0x50 ret_from_fork_asm+0x1a/0x30 Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240812095517.2357-1-dtcccc@linux.alibaba.com Signed-off-by: Tianchen Ding Reviewed-by: Marco Elver Cc: Alexander Potapenko Cc: Dmitry Vyukov Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton

mm: kfence: print the elapsed time for allocated/freed track

2024-09-02T03:26:04+00:00

Print the elapsed time for the allocated or freed track, which can be useful in some debugging scenarios. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240807025627.37419-1-qiwu.chen@transsion.com Signed-off-by: qiwu.chen Reviewed-by: Marco Elver Cc: chenqiwu Cc: Dmitry Vyukov Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton

kfence: introduce burst mode

2024-09-02T03:26:03+00:00

Introduce burst mode, which can be configured with kfence.burst=$count, where the burst count denotes the additional successive slab allocations to be allocated through KFENCE for each sample interval. The idea is that this can give developers an additional knob to make KFENCE more aggressive when debugging specific issues of systems where either rebooting or recompiling the kernel with KASAN is not possible. Experiment: To assess the effectiveness of the new option, we randomly picked a recent out-of-bounds [1] and use-after-free bug [2], each with a reproducer provided by syzbot, that initially detected these bugs with KASAN. We then tried to reproduce the bugs with KFENCE below. [1] Fixed by: 7c55b78818cf ("jfs: xattr: fix buffer overflow for invalid xattr") https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?id=9d1b59d4718239da6f6069d3891863c25f9f24a2 [2] Fixed by: f8ad00f3fb2a ("l2tp: fix possible UAF when cleaning up tunnels") https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?id=4f34adc84f4a3b080187c390eeef60611fd450e1 The following KFENCE configs were compared. A pool size of 1023 objects was used for all configurations. Baseline kfence.sample_interval=100 kfence.skip_covered_thresh=75 kfence.burst=0 Aggressive kfence.sample_interval=1 kfence.skip_covered_thresh=10 kfence.burst=0 AggressiveBurst kfence.sample_interval=1 kfence.skip_covered_thresh=10 kfence.burst=1000 Each reproducer was run 10 times (after a fresh reboot), with the following detection counts for each KFENCE config: | Detection Count out of 10 | | OOB [1] | UAF [2] | ------------------+-------------+-------------+ Default | 0/10 | 0/10 | Aggressive | 0/10 | 0/10 | AggressiveBurst | 8/10 | 8/10 | With the Default and even the Aggressive configs the results are unsurprising, given KFENCE has not been designed for deterministic bug detection of small test cases. However, when enabling burst mode with relatively large burst count, KFENCE can start to detect heap memory-safety bugs even in simpler test cases with high probability (in the above cases with ~80% probability). Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240805124203.2692278-1-elver@google.com Signed-off-by: Marco Elver Reviewed-by: Alexander Potapenko Cc: Andrey Konovalov Cc: Dmitry Vyukov Cc: Jann Horn Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton

mm: remove CONFIG_MEMCG_KMEM

2024-07-10T19:14:54+00:00

CONFIG_MEMCG_KMEM used to be a user-visible option for whether slab tracking is enabled. It has been default-enabled and equivalent to CONFIG_MEMCG for almost a decade. We've only grown more kernel memory accounting sites since, and there is no imaginable cgroup usecase going forward that wants to track user pages but not the multitude of user-drivable kernel allocations. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240701153148.452230-1-hannes@cmpxchg.org Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner Acked-by: Roman Gushchin Acked-by: Michal Hocko Acked-by: Shakeel Butt Acked-by: David Hildenbrand Cc: Muchun Song Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton

mm: kfence: disable KMSAN when checking the canary

2024-07-04T02:30:23+00:00

KMSAN warns about check_canary() accessing the canary. The reason is that, even though set_canary() is properly instrumented and sets shadow, slub explicitly poisons the canary's address range afterwards. Unpoisoning the canary is not the right thing to do: only check_canary() is supposed to ever touch it. Instead, disable KMSAN checks around canary read accesses. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240621113706.315500-20-iii@linux.ibm.com Signed-off-by: Ilya Leoshkevich Reviewed-by: Alexander Potapenko Tested-by: Alexander Potapenko Cc: Alexander Gordeev Cc: Christian Borntraeger Cc: Christoph Lameter Cc: David Rientjes Cc: Dmitry Vyukov Cc: Heiko Carstens Cc: Hyeonggon Yoo <42.hyeyoo@gmail.com> Cc: Joonsoo Kim Cc: Cc: Marco Elver Cc: Mark Rutland Cc: Masami Hiramatsu (Google) Cc: Pekka Enberg Cc: Roman Gushchin Cc: Steven Rostedt (Google) Cc: Sven Schnelle Cc: Vasily Gorbik Cc: Vlastimil Babka Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton