Skip to content
  • Daniel Borkmann's avatar
    bpf: adjust verifier heuristics · 3c2ce60b
    Daniel Borkmann authored
    
    
    Current limits with regards to processing program paths do not
    really reflect today's needs anymore due to programs becoming
    more complex and verifier smarter, keeping track of more data
    such as const ALU operations, alignment tracking, spilling of
    PTR_TO_MAP_VALUE_ADJ registers, and other features allowing for
    smarter matching of what LLVM generates.
    
    This also comes with the side-effect that we result in fewer
    opportunities to prune search states and thus often need to do
    more work to prove safety than in the past due to different
    register states and stack layout where we mismatch. Generally,
    it's quite hard to determine what caused a sudden increase in
    complexity, it could be caused by something as trivial as a
    single branch somewhere at the beginning of the program where
    LLVM assigned a stack slot that is marked differently throughout
    other branches and thus causing a mismatch, where verifier
    then needs to prove safety for the whole rest of the program.
    Subsequently, programs with even less than half the insn size
    limit can get rejected. We noticed that while some programs
    load fine under pre 4.11, they get rejected due to hitting
    limits on more recent kernels. We saw that in the vast majority
    of cases (90+%) pruning failed due to register mismatches. In
    case of stack mismatches, majority of cases failed due to
    different stack slot types (invalid, spill, misc) rather than
    differences in spilled registers.
    
    This patch makes pruning more aggressive by also adding markers
    that sit at conditional jumps as well. Currently, we only mark
    jump targets for pruning. For example in direct packet access,
    these are usually error paths where we bail out. We found that
    adding these markers, it can reduce number of processed insns
    by up to 30%. Another option is to ignore reg->id in probing
    PTR_TO_MAP_VALUE_OR_NULL registers, which can help pruning
    slightly as well by up to 7% observed complexity reduction as
    stand-alone. Meaning, if a previous path with register type
    PTR_TO_MAP_VALUE_OR_NULL for map X was found to be safe, then
    in the current state a PTR_TO_MAP_VALUE_OR_NULL register for
    the same map X must be safe as well. Last but not least the
    patch also adds a scheduling point and bumps the current limit
    for instructions to be processed to a more adequate value.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDaniel Borkmann <daniel@iogearbox.net>
    Acked-by: default avatarAlexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
    3c2ce60b