Horton

Re: Worth using personality(ADDR_NO_RANDOMIZE) for EXEC_BACKEND on linux?

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>

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From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>
To: Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>
Cc: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2021-08-09T17:30:00Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On 2021-Aug-06, Andrew Dunstan wrote:

> On 8/5/21 11:29 PM, Andres Freund wrote:

> > I was wondering if we should have postmaster do personality(ADDR_NO_RANDOMIZE)
> > for EXEC_BACKEND builds? It seems nicer to make it automatically work than
> > have people remember that they need to call "setarch --addr-no-randomize make check".

How common is to get a failure?  I know I've run tests under
EXEC_BACKEND and not seen any failures.  Not many runs though.

> > Not that it actually matters for EXEC_BACKEND, but theoretically doing
> > personality(ADDR_NO_RANDOMIZE) in postmaster is a tad more secure than doing
> > it via setarch, as in the personality() case postmaster's layout itself is
> > still randomized...

True.  I think the security aspect is not critically important, since
hopefully nobody should be using such builds for production.


> (Thinks: do we have non-Windows buildfarm members doing EXEC_BACKEND?)

culicidae does that.

-- 
Álvaro Herrera         PostgreSQL Developer  —  https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
"Pido que me den el Nobel por razones humanitarias" (Nicanor Parra)

Commits

  1. Make EXEC_BACKEND more convenient on Linux and FreeBSD.

  2. Make EXEC_BACKEND more convenient on macOS.