Virtual Address Space Adjustments

Summary

Virtual address space related changes split off from SIMD-0219: Removing pitfalls and foot-guns from the ABI (including syscalls) and runtime.

Motivation

In a recent meeting between the Agave and Firedancer core developers it was decided that SIMD-0219 should be split into two feature gates. This SIMD covers the second half which is focused on the address translation, memory mappings, reallocation / resizing, zeroing and defining empty / unmapped address space.

The reasoning for splitting SIMD-0219 is to de-risk its deployment and to be able to make progress on shipping earlier parts even if later parts have to be delayed further.

Additionally, as the unaligned address translation mechanism required for this part of SIMD-0219 incurs a slight performance decrease, it was decided to globally deactivate stack frame gaps to counter the effect. Stack frame gaps were identified as a performance issue in the address translation in general.

New Terminology

None.

Detailed Design

Changes inherited from SIMD-0219

Memory accesses (both by the program and by syscalls) which span across memory mapping regions are considered access violations. Accesses to multiple regions (e.g. by memcpy syscalls) have to be split into multiple separate accesses (one for each region) by the user.

For all memory accesses to the payload address space of an account which is flagged as writable and owned by the currently executed program, check that:

• The access is completely within the maximum account length, otherwise InstructionError::InvalidRealloc must be thrown.
• The access is completely within the rest of the account growth budget of the transaction, otherwise InstructionError::InvalidRealloc must be thrown.
• The access is completely within the current length of the account, otherwise extend the account with zeros to the maximum allowed by the previous two checks.

For loads / read accesses to the payload address space of an account check that:

• The access is completely within the current length of the account, otherwise InstructionError::AccountDataTooSmall must be thrown.

For stores / write accesses to the payload address space of an account check that:

• The account is flagged as writable, otherwise InstructionError::ReadonlyDataModified must be thrown
• The account is owned by the currently executed program, otherwise InstructionError::ExternalAccountDataModified must be thrown.

Additional changes

Stack frame gaps must be deactivated globally (even for existing SBPFv0 programs). So far they were only deactivated for newer SBPF versions.

After the removal of the gaps the stack address space will be compacted by a factor of two but the total mapped bytes will stay the same. They will simply be at lower addresses than before and form one contiguous address range. See example below:

In SBPFv0 the stack frame bump on call and callx must be lowered from 8 KiB to 4 KiB (this is already the case in SBPFv3).

Alternatives Considered

Leaving SIMD-0219 as is.

Impact

Splitting SIMD-0219 should have no impact on dApp developers or validators. An experiment to gauge the impact of the additional changes is currently running.

Security Considerations

Removing the stack frame gaps globally (even for SBPFv0) programs can affect programs which rely on the address space layout of the stack either by using absolute addressing, relative addressing across stack frames or being dependent on bugs such accesses reaching over the boundary of stack frames.