We've been testing performance of MTE on the Pixel 11 using the Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 release adding back firmware support for it. MTE in asymmetric ...
We've been testing performance of MTE on the Pixel 11 using the Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 release adding back firmware support for it. MTE in asymmetric mode only has around 5% overhead in the standard benchmarks and other tests we've done. That's more than good enough but we've done limited tests.
Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 on the Pixel 11 force disables MTE for the OS from the firmware. Using it requires ignoring the arm64.nomte parameter being passed to the kernel. It still isn't clear why they're making the feature unavailable. SVE was also force disabled in Android 17 but not in QPR2 Beta 4.
Our initial testing indicates performance isn't substantially worse. The overhead may be higher but there was an incremental CPU performance with the Pixel 11 which should more than make up for it. However, MTE is unavailable with stable firmware and we're bypassing firmware disabling it for QPR2.
Multiple Google engineers we've contacted have said they aren't able to give us any information about this so we're left doing reverse engineering and relying on leaks. The leaks do not seem reliable and do not match what we see. Our concern is that MTE may actually be broken due to CPU errata.
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