[surajrmal]

I feel like you're complaining, but it seems like Google has made historic advancements simply by pushing this technology to the point it's available and fixed most of not all crashes it finds. Stopping short of the goal by not enabling it on prod is likely a well reasoned choice. Google is highly committed to the underlying technology. It doesn't seem like the door to having it enabled in prod is forever closed and perhaps one day it'll happen. You don't have access to all of the information, so you're naturally going to jump to conclusions that might not actually be the best choice.

[strcat]

We have active communication with many people at Google about the areas we're heavily working on such as this and are not basing this on assumptions. You're talking about what you think happened based on your assumptions about it from lightly reading about it.

Most of the crashes were fixed via HWAsan before MTE existed in hardware. Their security people want MTE enabled in production. These issues were fixed before MTE and would have been fixed whether or not MTE was available in the standard ARMv9 cores/cache used by Pixels. MTE would likely already be enabled in production for the base OS (not user installed apps) if there weren't performance concerns. They clearly integrated it with that intention. We're more than capable of reading the commit messages and talking to engineers who worked on it along with other contacts there. They aren't keeping it a secret that there's a clear goal to enable MTE in production.

ARM provided MTE in their standard ARMv9 Cortex core designs. That's why MTE is available on the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, because Tensor currently uses the standard core/cache designs. That's why MTE is not available for Snapdragon, and it's why it is theoretically available for MediaTek and Exynos.

The current availability of a high performance MTE implementation doesn't mean Google is highly committed to it. Pixels will be moving from standard Cortex core designs to their own core designs. There's an open question about whether MTE will be supported in the same way it is now. You're assuming that they're heavily committed to it and going to keep providing an extremely low overhead implementation. We have concrete reasons to be concerned.