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

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)