GeezerVison

This also fixes an issue where we weren't using the correct alignment during parts of the build process and things just accidentally worked (due to the data starting on a page boundary).

I realise it probably makes sense to benchmark this one on macOS (since that's where we saw the greatest memory increase in #116017). I'll fire off a run right now.

Oh, I already did. :) Results were less good: 1% faster, no memory impact (which is a bit odd, but I haven't really dug into it yet).

Instead of marking code as read-exec and data as read-only, put both on the same read-exec pages.

@brandtbucher I may be missing something here: is this a reduction in security? Has this been discussed with the security team?

Instead of marking code as read-exec and data as read-only, put both on the same read-exec pages.

@brandtbucher I may be missing something here: is this a reduction in security? Has this been discussed with the security team?

I should clarify: this change doesn't mean that we're now executing arbitrary user data. In this case, "data" is stuff like C string literals for error messages, pointers to cached objects, static C function addresses, version numbers, opargs, etc.

Since this data is now executable (as it lives on the same pages as the machine code), in theory an attacker capable of forcing the compilation of an instruction operand that happens to have the same encoding as a machine instruction could take control of the program. However, that would require that we jump into the data at some point, something which never happens during normal operation. As such, this would require a separate, highly specific bug in machine code generation in order to actually exploit.

The most likely way this would happen is not by jumping from the machine code into the data, but rather accidentally running off the end of the machine code into the data portion of the buffer (again, not something that happens with the sort of well-formed traces that tier two creates). This situation currently crashes on main, but would indeed begin executing the "read-only" data with the proposed change. However, this patch mitigates this risk by always adding a _FATAL_ERROR block to the end of the code portion of the trace, assuring that even if we did have a malformed trace, the program would abort before it actually overran the buffer.

I appreciate your comment, though. Please let me know if I've missed anything, or if you still have any concerns.

@brandtbucher: Just FYI: a 20% reduction in memory usage on macOS on the benchmarking suite: https://github.com/faster-cpython/benchmarking-public/blob/main/results/bm-20240315-3.13.0a5%2B-e6d8e6d-JIT/bm-20240315-darwin-arm64-brandtbucher-justin_mprotect-3.13.0a5%2B-e6d8e6d-vs-base-mem.png

Awesome! Wonder why it didn't come through in my first run...

The compiler on that machine was still broken when you kicked it off yesterday -- I didn't truly fix it until this morning.

It's also a solid 1-3% faster on macOS.

The compiler on that machine was still broken when you kicked it off yesterday -- I didn't truly fix it until this morning.

Oh, I see you mean the run from 5 days ago. Yeah, it's not clear why it shows "no change". Something to keep an eye on for the future in case there is a bug somewhere in the benchmarking infra (but not clear what it would be).