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authorDaniel Borkmann <daniel@iogearbox.net>2016-04-05 22:33:17 +0200
committerDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>2016-04-08 16:16:42 -0400
commit07016151a446d25397b24588df4ed5cf777a69bb (patch)
treea71bc4074fc0bb4cdb8302ca12bf43a30fba244b /Documentation/serial
parent1fc2257e837f86c2688fdcc5c8810b73c133794d (diff)
downloadlinux-07016151a446d25397b24588df4ed5cf777a69bb.tar.bz2
bpf, verifier: further improve search pruning
The verifier needs to go through every path of the program in order to check that it terminates safely, which can be quite a lot of instructions that need to be processed f.e. in cases with more branchy programs. With search pruning from f1bca824dabb ("bpf: add search pruning optimization to verifier") the search space can already be reduced significantly when the verifier detects that a previously walked path with same register and stack contents terminated already (see verifier's states_equal()), so the search can skip walking those states. When working with larger programs of > ~2000 (out of max 4096) insns, we found that the current limit of 32k instructions is easily hit. For example, a case we ran into is that the search space cannot be pruned due to branches at the beginning of the program that make use of certain stack space slots (STACK_MISC), which are never used in the remaining program (STACK_INVALID). Therefore, the verifier needs to walk paths for the slots in STACK_INVALID state, but also all remaining paths with a stack structure, where the slots are in STACK_MISC, which can nearly double the search space needed. After various experiments, we find that a limit of 64k processed insns is a more reasonable choice when dealing with larger programs in practice. This still allows to reject extreme crafted cases that can have a much higher complexity (f.e. > ~300k) within the 4096 insns limit due to search pruning not being able to take effect. Furthermore, we found that a lot of states can be pruned after a call instruction, f.e. we were able to reduce the search state by ~35% in some cases with this heuristic, trade-off is to keep a bit more states in env->explored_states. Usually, call instructions have a number of preceding register assignments and/or stack stores, where search pruning has a better chance to suceed in states_equal() test. The current code marks the branch targets with STATE_LIST_MARK in case of conditional jumps, and the next (t + 1) instruction in case of unconditional jump so that f.e. a backjump will walk it. We also did experiments with using t + insns[t].off + 1 as a marker in the unconditionally jump case instead of t + 1 with the rationale that these two branches of execution that converge after the label might have more potential of pruning. We found that it was a bit better, but not necessarily significantly better than the current state, perhaps also due to clang not generating back jumps often. Hence, we left that as is for now. Signed-off-by: Daniel Borkmann <daniel@iogearbox.net> Acked-by: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
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