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  1. Apr 01, 2024
    • Eric Biggers's avatar
      crypto: remove CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS · 29ce50e0
      Eric Biggers authored
      Remove support for the "Crypto usage statistics" feature
      (CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS).  This feature does not appear to have ever been
      used, and it is harmful because it significantly reduces performance and
      is a large maintenance burden.
      
      Covering each of these points in detail:
      
      1. Feature is not being used
      
      Since these generic crypto statistics are only readable using netlink,
      it's fairly straightforward to look for programs that use them.  I'm
      unable to find any evidence that any such programs exist.  For example,
      Debian Code Search returns no hits except the kernel header and kernel
      code itself and translations of the kernel header:
      https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=CRYPTOCFGA_STAT&literal=1&perpkg=1
      
      The patch series that added this feature in 2018
      (https://lore.kernel.org/linux-crypto/1537351855-16618-1-git-send-email-clabbe@baylibre.com/)
      said "The goal is to have an ifconfig for crypto device."  This doesn't
      appear to have happened.
      
      It's not clear that there is real demand for crypto statistics.  Just
      because the kernel provides other types of statistics such as I/O and
      networking statistics and some people find those useful does not mean
      that crypto statistics are useful too.
      
      Further evidence that programs are not using CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS is that
      it was able to be disabled in RHEL and Fedora as a bug fix
      (https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/src/kernel/centos-stream-9/-/merge_requests/2947).
      
      Even further evidence comes from the fact that there are and have been
      bugs in how the stats work, but they were never reported.  For example,
      before Linux v6.7 hash stats were double-counted in most cases.
      
      There has also never been any documentation for this feature, so it
      might be hard to use even if someone wanted to.
      
      2. CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS significantly reduces performance
      
      Enabling CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS significantly reduces the performance of
      the crypto API, even if no program ever retrieves the statistics.  This
      primarily affects systems with a large number of CPUs.  For example,
      https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/2039576
      
       reported
      that Lustre client encryption performance improved from 21.7GB/s to
      48.2GB/s by disabling CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS.
      
      It can be argued that this means that CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS should be
      optimized with per-cpu counters similar to many of the networking
      counters.  But no one has done this in 5+ years.  This is consistent
      with the fact that the feature appears to be unused, so there seems to
      be little interest in improving it as opposed to just disabling it.
      
      It can be argued that because CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS is off by default,
      performance doesn't matter.  But Linux distros tend to error on the side
      of enabling options.  The option is enabled in Ubuntu and Arch Linux,
      and until recently was enabled in RHEL and Fedora (see above).  So, even
      just having the option available is harmful to users.
      
      3. CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS is a large maintenance burden
      
      There are over 1000 lines of code associated with CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS,
      spread among 32 files.  It significantly complicates much of the
      implementation of the crypto API.  After the initial submission, many
      fixes and refactorings have consumed effort of multiple people to keep
      this feature "working".  We should be spending this effort elsewhere.
      
      Acked-by: default avatarArd Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>
      Acked-by: default avatarCorentin Labbe <clabbe@baylibre.com>
      Signed-off-by: default avatarEric Biggers <ebiggers@google.com>
      Signed-off-by: default avatarHerbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
      29ce50e0
  2. Mar 12, 2024
  3. Mar 01, 2024
    • Eric Biggers's avatar
      crypto: remove CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS · 2beb81fb
      Eric Biggers authored
      Remove support for the "Crypto usage statistics" feature
      (CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS).  This feature does not appear to have ever been
      used, and it is harmful because it significantly reduces performance and
      is a large maintenance burden.
      
      Covering each of these points in detail:
      
      1. Feature is not being used
      
      Since these generic crypto statistics are only readable using netlink,
      it's fairly straightforward to look for programs that use them.  I'm
      unable to find any evidence that any such programs exist.  For example,
      Debian Code Search returns no hits except the kernel header and kernel
      code itself and translations of the kernel header:
      https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=CRYPTOCFGA_STAT&literal=1&perpkg=1
      
      The patch series that added this feature in 2018
      (https://lore.kernel.org/linux-crypto/1537351855-16618-1-git-send-email-clabbe@baylibre.com/)
      said "The goal is to have an ifconfig for crypto device."  This doesn't
      appear to have happened.
      
      It's not clear that there is real demand for crypto statistics.  Just
      because the kernel provides other types of statistics such as I/O and
      networking statistics and some people find those useful does not mean
      that crypto statistics are useful too.
      
      Further evidence that programs are not using CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS is that
      it was able to be disabled in RHEL and Fedora as a bug fix
      (https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/src/kernel/centos-stream-9/-/merge_requests/2947).
      
      Even further evidence comes from the fact that there are and have been
      bugs in how the stats work, but they were never reported.  For example,
      before Linux v6.7 hash stats were double-counted in most cases.
      
      There has also never been any documentation for this feature, so it
      might be hard to use even if someone wanted to.
      
      2. CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS significantly reduces performance
      
      Enabling CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS significantly reduces the performance of
      the crypto API, even if no program ever retrieves the statistics.  This
      primarily affects systems with large number of CPUs.  For example,
      https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/2039576
      
       reported
      that Lustre client encryption performance improved from 21.7GB/s to
      48.2GB/s by disabling CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS.
      
      It can be argued that this means that CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS should be
      optimized with per-cpu counters similar to many of the networking
      counters.  But no one has done this in 5+ years.  This is consistent
      with the fact that the feature appears to be unused, so there seems to
      be little interest in improving it as opposed to just disabling it.
      
      It can be argued that because CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS is off by default,
      performance doesn't matter.  But Linux distros tend to error on the side
      of enabling options.  The option is enabled in Ubuntu and Arch Linux,
      and until recently was enabled in RHEL and Fedora (see above).  So, even
      just having the option available is harmful to users.
      
      3. CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS is a large maintenance burden
      
      There are over 1000 lines of code associated with CONFIG_CRYPTO_STATS,
      spread among 32 files.  It significantly complicates much of the
      implementation of the crypto API.  After the initial submission, many
      fixes and refactorings have consumed effort of multiple people to keep
      this feature "working".  We should be spending this effort elsewhere.
      
      Cc: Corentin Labbe <clabbe@baylibre.com>
      Signed-off-by: default avatarEric Biggers <ebiggers@google.com>
      Acked-by: default avatarArd Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>
      Acked-by: default avatarCorentin Labbe <clabbe@baylibre.com>
      Signed-off-by: default avatarHerbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
      2beb81fb
  4. May 02, 2023
  5. Mar 14, 2023
    • Herbert Xu's avatar
      crypto: api - Check CRYPTO_USER instead of NET for report · c0f9e01d
      Herbert Xu authored
      
      The report function is currently conditionalised on CONFIG_NET.
      As it's only used by CONFIG_CRYPTO_USER, conditionalising on that
      instead of CONFIG_NET makes more sense.
      
      This gets rid of a rarely used code-path.
      
      Signed-off-by: default avatarHerbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
      c0f9e01d
    • Herbert Xu's avatar
      crypto: acomp - Count error stats differently · 0a742389
      Herbert Xu authored
      
      Move all stat code specific to acomp into the acomp code.
      
      While we're at it, change the stats so that bytes and counts
      are always incremented even in case of error.  This allows the
      reference counting to be removed as we can now increment the
      counters prior to the operation.
      
      After the operation we simply increase the error count if necessary.
      This is safe as errors can only occur synchronously (or rather,
      the existing code already ignored asynchronous errors which are
      only visible to the callback function).
      
      Signed-off-by: default avatarHerbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
      0a742389
  6. Jul 09, 2020
    • Barry Song's avatar
      crypto: api - permit users to specify numa node of acomp hardware · 7bc13b5b
      Barry Song authored
      
      For a Linux server with NUMA, there are possibly multiple (de)compressors
      which are either local or remote to some NUMA node. Some drivers will
      automatically use the (de)compressor near the CPU calling acomp_alloc().
      However, it is not necessarily correct because users who send acomp_req
      could be from different NUMA node with the CPU which allocates acomp.
      
      Just like kernel has kmalloc() and kmalloc_node(), here crypto can have
      same support.
      
      Cc: Seth Jennings <sjenning@redhat.com>
      Cc: Dan Streetman <ddstreet@ieee.org>
      Cc: Vitaly Wool <vitaly.wool@konsulko.com>
      Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
      Cc: Jonathan Cameron <Jonathan.Cameron@huawei.com>
      Signed-off-by: default avatarBarry Song <song.bao.hua@hisilicon.com>
      Signed-off-by: default avatarHerbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
      7bc13b5b
  7. Dec 20, 2019
    • Eric Biggers's avatar
      crypto: algapi - make unregistration functions return void · c6d633a9
      Eric Biggers authored
      
      Some of the algorithm unregistration functions return -ENOENT when asked
      to unregister a non-registered algorithm, while others always return 0
      or always return void.  But no users check the return value, except for
      two of the bulk unregistration functions which print a message on error
      but still always return 0 to their caller, and crypto_del_alg() which
      calls crypto_unregister_instance() which always returns 0.
      
      Since unregistering a non-registered algorithm is always a kernel bug
      but there isn't anything callers should do to handle this situation at
      runtime, let's simplify things by making all the unregistration
      functions return void, and moving the error message into
      crypto_unregister_alg() and upgrading it to a WARN().
      
      Signed-off-by: default avatarEric Biggers <ebiggers@google.com>
      Signed-off-by: default avatarHerbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
      c6d633a9
  8. May 30, 2019
  9. Nov 09, 2018
    • Eric Biggers's avatar
      crypto: user - clean up report structure copying · 37db69e0
      Eric Biggers authored
      There have been a pretty ridiculous number of issues with initializing
      the report structures that are copied to userspace by NETLINK_CRYPTO.
      Commit 4473710d ("crypto: user - Prepare for CRYPTO_MAX_ALG_NAME
      expansion") replaced some strncpy()s with strlcpy()s, thereby
      introducing information leaks.  Later two other people tried to replace
      other strncpy()s with strlcpy() too, which would have introduced even
      more information leaks:
      
          - https://lore.kernel.org/patchwork/patch/954991/
          - https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10434351/
      
      Commit cac5818c
      
       ("crypto: user - Implement a generic crypto
      statistics") also uses the buggy strlcpy() approach and therefore leaks
      uninitialized memory to userspace.  A fix was proposed, but it was
      originally incomplete.
      
      Seeing as how apparently no one can get this right with the current
      approach, change all the reporting functions to:
      
      - Start by memsetting the report structure to 0.  This guarantees it's
        always initialized, regardless of what happens later.
      - Initialize all strings using strscpy().  This is safe after the
        memset, ensures null termination of long strings, avoids unnecessary
        work, and avoids the -Wstringop-truncation warnings from gcc.
      - Use sizeof(var) instead of sizeof(type).  This is more robust against
        copy+paste errors.
      
      For simplicity, also reuse the -EMSGSIZE return value from nla_put().
      
      Signed-off-by: default avatarEric Biggers <ebiggers@google.com>
      Signed-off-by: default avatarHerbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
      37db69e0
  10. Apr 21, 2017
  11. Jan 12, 2017
    • Gideon Israel Dsouza's avatar
      crypto: Replaced gcc specific attributes with macros from compiler.h · d8c34b94
      Gideon Israel Dsouza authored
      Continuing from this commit: 52f5684c
      
      
      ("kernel: use macros from compiler.h instead of __attribute__((...))")
      
      I submitted 4 total patches. They are part of task I've taken up to
      increase compiler portability in the kernel. I've cleaned up the
      subsystems under /kernel /mm /block and /security, this patch targets
      /crypto.
      
      There is <linux/compiler.h> which provides macros for various gcc specific
      constructs. Eg: __weak for __attribute__((weak)). I've cleaned all
      instances of gcc specific attributes with the right macros for the crypto
      subsystem.
      
      I had to make one additional change into compiler-gcc.h for the case when
      one wants to use this: __attribute__((aligned) and not specify an alignment
      factor. From the gcc docs, this will result in the largest alignment for
      that data type on the target machine so I've named the macro
      __aligned_largest. Please advise if another name is more appropriate.
      
      Signed-off-by: default avatarGideon Israel Dsouza <gidisrael@gmail.com>
      Signed-off-by: default avatarHerbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
      d8c34b94
  12. Oct 24, 2016