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GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

grapheneos.social

131–140 of 175 posts

Re: GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's only a significant cost to synchronous MTE. MTE ships two modes. synchronous mode and asynchronous mode. SYNC is slower but gives you far better traces and throws an SEGV_MTESERR as soon as violations happen. ASYNC however is async so there's a bit of a delay between a violation and the "catch" that throws SEGV_MTEAERR. Strictly speaking async is worse for security because there's a brief window of time where…

Given the current use of AI tools I would think that SEGV_MTESERR crashes would be low hanging fruit to fix. AI tools do ok with identifying memory corruption issues, given a smoking gun, in my experience.

SEGV_MTESERR is reasonably low hanging fruit until it's in a binary blob and the IC manufacturer said service interfaces with refuses to do anything to fix it.

Likewise if it's because a language is being lazy with how it handles memory (see: wireguard-go SEGV_MTESERR because golang's string implementation was being overly permissive with pointers).

And of course this only applies to SEGV_MTESERR. SEGV_MTESERR has a much higher runtime overhead that Google and co would not tolerate (but Graphene does) so they'd likely only be willing to use SEGV_MTEAERR which provides traces that point at a completely different place than where the fault occurred (but still provide a little bit of useful info).

Re: GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

#132
> It's possible to enable reserving the tag memory for MTE via `fastboot oem mte on`, boot a non-stock kernel ignoring arm64.nomte and use MTE.

What I'd like to know is, is it not sufficient to just check the feature bits in ID_AA64PFR1_EL1? (Isn't this the first thing you'd try when trying to determine if the hardware supports some feature?)

If they were making the determination solely based on the fact that `arm64.nomte` is being passed to the kernel (or based on what features are exposed by kernel interfaces), it may have been better to say "MTE is seemingly disabled in the current Android release" rather than claiming that it's simply not present in hardware. If you're asking the Linux kernel about hardware features, maybe it takes cmdline arguments into account when presenting that info to userspace.

The TRM[^1] mentions that some of the feature bits depend on BROADCASTMTE (presumably some CPU input pin), but maybe that signal isn't constant and is allowed to change based on what happens in firmware/the bootloader?

Also, why the claim about the lack of hardware acceleration for MTE in the caches, is there evidence for that, or is this also a misunderstanding?

I think it's reasonable to assume that the perf impact of MTE is non-negligible (on cores in older Pixel devices[^2], MTE apparently suffers from the fact that checked stores are serializing!), but it's entirely possible that this does not follow from some physical design concession when implementing the SoC. The characterization of all this as some kind of cost-cutting measure is not necessarily accurate.

[^1]: https://support.arm.com/documentation/108014/0101/?lang=en

[^2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11786

Re: GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

#133

It’s absurd that a small project like Graphene is able to run rings around a giant like Google in the security sphere. Almost makes you wonder if some of those vulnerabilities are intentionally allowed to exist. Vulnerabilities in the world’s most popular (by volume) mobile OS could provide a plausibly deniable global espionage backdoor.

They're running rings around google... by enabling features that google develops/support?

Re: GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

#135

> It's possible to enable reserving the tag memory for MTE via `fastboot oem mte on`, boot a non-stock kernel ignoring arm64.nomte and use MTE. What I'd like to know is, is it not sufficient to just check the feature bits in ID_AA64PFR1_EL1? (Isn't this the first thing you'd try when trying to determine if the hardware supports some feature?) If they were making the determination solely based on the fact that `arm64.…

A "Google bad" essay gets a lot more clicks.

Re: GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

#136

[flagged]

> As much as it seems beloved here, people that flash custom Android OSs are the very definition of niche users. Hmm... Let's try reframing this: "as much as it seems beloved here, people that install their own operating systems on PCs are the very definition of niche users" I'm absolutely certain that's how IBM felt before the clones. But the ability to install what they wanted on a defacto standard platform is what…

> Hmm... Let's try reframing this: "as much as it seems beloved here, people that install their own operating systems on PCs are the very definition of niche users"

I mean yeah, 99% of people never installed an OS and never will, what's your point here?

Re: GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

#137

[flagged]

You might not like their style of speech, at least they care about their users. Maybe Google uses nice flowery language that makes the reader feel nice—IDC—actions speak louder than words. Stock Pixel is an awful experience. So many useless notifications, popups, ads, privacy not by default. Company: "We care about your privacy" meanwhile 1400 corporations they share data with GrapheneOS: "There's zero telemetry in G…

> Stock Pixel is an awful experience. So many useless notifications, popups, ads, privacy not by default.

Huh? What pixel are you on? You only get notifications from stuff you install after the initial setup is done. And even then you can outright mute applications, completely.

Re: GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

#138
post #21

"Aside from MTE, Google downgraded the Pixel 11 series GPU compared to the Pixel 10 series in addition to reducing RAM for base Pro models." I will make a note not to buy this model. Is this the worst quality control lapse since the Huawei Nexus core failures?

The GPU claim is contradicted by pretty much every benchmark though.

Re: GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As much as it seems beloved here, people that flash custom Android OSs are the very definition of niche users. Hmm... Let's try reframing this: "as much as it seems beloved here, people that install their own operating systems on PCs are the very definition of niche users" I'm absolutely certain that's how IBM felt before the clones. But the ability to install what they wanted on a defacto standard platform is what…

> Hmm... Let's try reframing this: "as much as it seems beloved here, people that install their own operating systems on PCs are the very definition of niche users" I mean yeah, 99% of people never installed an OS and never will, what's your point here?

> 99% of people never installed an OS and never will, what's your point here?

That the 1% who do build visicalc, Linux, the internet, Google, and every application and innovation that happens outside the corporate wall. The entire ecosystem everyone else ends up using.

And that calling that niche is ridiculous, shortsighted, and shooting oneself as a platform owner in the foot.

Re: GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

#140
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Graphene puts a HEAVY emphasis on security. Also your argument about a user inspecting and editing application files feels like a strawman argument. For example many spyware use malicious links to infect the devices, not malicious apps.

[flagged]
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