arm64 syzbot instances

[Dmitry Vyukov]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 1:33 PM Mark Rutland <mark.rutland at arm.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 12:38:21PM +0100, 'Dmitry Vyukov' via syzkaller wrote:
> > Hi arm64 maintainers,
> > The instances have KCOV disabled because it slows down execution too
> > much (KASAN in qemu emulation is already extremely slow), so no
> > coverage guidance and coverage reports for now :(
> >
> > The instances found few arm64-specific issues that we have not
> > observed on other instances:
> > https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?id=1d22a2cc3521d5cf6b41bd6b825793c2015f861f
> > https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?id=bb2c16b0e13b4de4bbf22cf6a4b9b16fb0c20eea
> > https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?id=b75386f45318ec181b7f49260d619fac9877d456
> > https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?id=5a1bc29bca656159f95c7c8bb30e3776ca860332
> > but mostly re-discovering known bugs we already found on x86.
>
> Likewise, my general experience these days (fuzzing under KVM on a
> ThunderX2 host) is that we mostly hit issues in core code or drivers
> rather than anything strictly specific to arm64. As my host is ARMv8.1
> that might just be by virtue of not exercising many of the new
> architectural features.
>
> > The instances use qemu emulation and lots of debug configs, so they
> > are quite slow and it makes sense to target them at arm64-specific
> > parts of the kernel as much as possible (rather
> > than stress generic subsystems that are already stressed on x86).
> > So the question is: what arm64-specific parts are there that we can reach
> > in qemu?
> > Can you think of any qemu flags (cpu features, device emulation, etc)?
>
> Generally, `-cpu max` will expose the more interesting CPU features, and
> you already seem to have that, so I think you're mostly there on that
> front.
>
> Devices vary a lot between SoCs (and most aren't even emulated), so
> unless you have particular platforms in mind I'd suggest it might be
> better to just use PV devices and try to focus fuzzing on arch code and
> common code like mm rather than drivers.

I don't have any specific SoC in mind. I think we are interested in
covering something more commonly used rather than a driver used only
on 1 SoC.
Testing virt drivers is good, but since we have 3 arm64 instances, we
could make then use different boards to get more coverage.
What about things like pstore, numa, mtdblock, pflash? When I do man
qemu-system-aarch64 for some reason I see help for x86_64, so I am not
sure if these are applicable to arm64.


> > Any kernel subsystems with heavy arm-specific parts that we may be missing?
>
> It looks like your configs already have BPF, which is probably one of
> the more interesting subsystems with architecture-specific bits, so I
> don't have further suggestions on that front.
>
> > Testing some of the arm64 drivers that qemu can emulate may be the
> > most profitable thing.
> > Currently the instances use the following flags:
> > -machine virt,virtualization=on,graphics=on,usb=on -cpu cortex-a57
> > -machine virt,virtualization=on,mte=on,graphics=on,usb=on -cpu max
>
> With `-cpu max`, QEMU will use a relatively expensive SW implementation
> of pointer authentication (which I found significantly magnified the
> cost of implementation like kcov), so depending on your priorities you
> might want to disable that or (assuming you have a recent enough build
> of QEMU) you might wantto force the use of a cheaper algorithm by
> passing `-cpu max,pauth-impef`.
>
> The relevant QEMU commit is:
>
> eb94284d0812b4e7 ("arget/arm: Add cpu properties to control pauth")
>
> ... but it looks like that might not yet be in a tagged release yet.

Interesting. I need to note this somewhere.


> > mte=on + virtualization=on is broken in the kernel on in the qemu:
> > https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAAeHK+wDz8aSLyjq1b=q3+HG9aJXxwYR6+gN_fTttMN5osM5gg@mail.gmail.com/
> >
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