Path: blob/main/website/content/en/status/report-2023-01-2023-03/aarch64-kasan.adoc
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=== Kernel Address Sanitizer on AArch64 Contact: Kyle Evans <[email protected]> Sanitizers are bug detection facilities which use a combination of instrumentation inserted by the compiler (LLVM in this case) and runtime state tracking to detect bugs in C code. They can automatically detect many types of C programming bugs, such as use-after-frees and uses of uninitialized variables, which may otherwise require substantial effort to identify. They are particularly effective in combination with regression testing suites or fuzzing tools such as link:https://github.com/google/syzkaller[syzkaller]. Unlike tools such as Valgrind, software must be recompiled to enable a given sanitizer, but sanitizers can be used in the kernel. Kernels with sanitizers enabled incur a significant performance overhead from the runtime, in both CPU utilization and memory usage. As of gitref:89c52f9d59fa[repository=src], the kernel address sanitizer that was previously exclusive to amd64 is ported to arm64. Prior testing has been done on a decent variety of machines, including: - Various Ampere Altra machines - QEMU - Microsoft's "Volterra" Devkit - bhyve (WIP). Further testing on other hardware would be both welcomed and appreciated. Sponsor: Juniper Networks, Inc. + Sponsor: Klara, Inc.