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ba42b524a0
Implements the "init_mlocked_on_free" boot option. When this boot option
is enabled, any mlock'ed pages are zeroed on free. If
the pages are munlock'ed beforehand, no initialization takes place.
This boot option is meant to combat the performance hit of
"init_on_free" as reported in commit 6471384af2a6 ("mm: security:
introduce init_on_alloc=1 and init_on_free=1 boot options"). With
"init_mlocked_on_free=1" only relevant data is freed while everything
else is left untouched by the kernel. Correspondingly, this patch
introduces no performance hit for unmapping non-mlock'ed memory. The
unmapping overhead for purely mlocked memory was measured to be
approximately 13%. Realistically, most systems mlock only a fraction of
the total memory so the real-world system overhead should be close to
zero.
Optimally, userspace programs clear any key material or other
confidential memory before exit and munlock the according memory
regions. If a program crashes, userspace key managers fail to do this
job. Accordingly, no munlock operations are performed so the data is
caught and zeroed by the kernel. Should the program not crash, all
memory will ideally be munlocked so no overhead is caused.
CONFIG_INIT_MLOCKED_ON_FREE_DEFAULT_ON can be set to enable
"init_mlocked_on_free" by default.
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240329145605.149917-1-yjnworkstation@gmail.com
Signed-off-by: York Jasper Niebuhr <yjnworkstation@gmail.com>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: York Jasper Niebuhr <yjnworkstation@gmail.com>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the reStructuredText markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.