linux/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt, branch v4.1

Doc/sysctl/kernel.txt: document threads-max

2015-04-17T13:04:07Z

File /proc/sys/kernel/threads-max controls the maximum number of threads that can be created using fork(). [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix typo, per Guenter] Signed-off-by: Heinrich Schuchardt Cc: Oleg Nesterov Cc: Ingo Molnar Cc: Guenter Roeck Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

watchdog: enable the new user interface of the watchdog mechanism

2015-04-14T23:48:59Z

With the current user interface of the watchdog mechanism it is only possible to disable or enable both lockup detectors at the same time. This series introduces new kernel parameters and changes the semantics of some existing kernel parameters, so that the hard lockup detector and the soft lockup detector can be disabled or enabled individually. With this series applied, the user interface is as follows. - parameters in /proc/sys/kernel . soft_watchdog This is a new parameter to control and examine the run state of the soft lockup detector. . nmi_watchdog The semantics of this parameter have changed. It can now be used to control and examine the run state of the hard lockup detector. . watchdog This parameter is still available to control the run state of both lockup detectors at the same time. If this parameter is examined, it shows the logical OR of soft_watchdog and nmi_watchdog. . watchdog_thresh The semantics of this parameter are not affected by the patch. - kernel command line parameters . nosoftlockup The semantics of this parameter have changed. It can now be used to disable the soft lockup detector at boot time. . nmi_watchdog=0 or nmi_watchdog=1 Disable or enable the hard lockup detector at boot time. The patch introduces '=1' as a new option. . nowatchdog The semantics of this parameter are not affected by the patch. It is still available to disable both lockup detectors at boot time. Also, remove the proc_dowatchdog() function which is no longer needed. [dzickus@redhat.com: wrote changelog] [dzickus@redhat.com: update documentation for kernel params and sysctl] Signed-off-by: Ulrich Obergfell Signed-off-by: Don Zickus Cc: Ingo Molnar Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

livepatch: kernel: add TAINT_LIVEPATCH

2014-12-22T14:40:48Z

This adds a new taint flag to indicate when the kernel or a kernel module has been live patched. This will provide a clean indication in bug reports that live patching was used. Additionally, if the crash occurs in a live patched function, the live patch module will appear beside the patched function in the backtrace. Signed-off-by: Seth Jennings Acked-by: Josh Poimboeuf Reviewed-by: Miroslav Benes Reviewed-by: Petr Mladek Reviewed-by: Masami Hiramatsu Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina

ipc/msg: increase MSGMNI, remove scaling

2014-12-13T20:42:52Z

SysV can be abused to allocate locked kernel memory. For most systems, a small limit doesn't make sense, see the discussion with regards to SHMMAX. Therefore: increase MSGMNI to the maximum supported. And: If we ignore the risk of locking too much memory, then an automatic scaling of MSGMNI doesn't make sense. Therefore the logic can be removed. The code preserves auto_msgmni to avoid breaking any user space applications that expect that the value exists. Notes: 1) If an administrator must limit the memory allocations, then he can set MSGMNI as necessary. Or he can disable sysv entirely (as e.g. done by Android). 2) MSGMAX and MSGMNB are intentionally not increased, as these values are used to control latency vs. throughput: If MSGMNB is large, then msgsnd() just returns and more messages can be queued before a task switch to a task that calls msgrcv() is forced. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes] Signed-off-by: Manfred Spraul Cc: Davidlohr Bueso Cc: Rafael Aquini Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

kernel: add panic_on_warn

2014-12-11T01:41:10Z

There have been several times where I have had to rebuild a kernel to cause a panic when hitting a WARN() in the code in order to get a crash dump from a system. Sometimes this is easy to do, other times (such as in the case of a remote admin) it is not trivial to send new images to the user. A much easier method would be a switch to change the WARN() over to a panic. This makes debugging easier in that I can now test the actual image the WARN() was seen on and I do not have to engage in remote debugging. This patch adds a panic_on_warn kernel parameter and /proc/sys/kernel/panic_on_warn calls panic() in the warn_slowpath_common() path. The function will still print out the location of the warning. An example of the panic_on_warn output: The first line below is from the WARN_ON() to output the WARN_ON()'s location. After that the panic() output is displayed. WARNING: CPU: 30 PID: 11698 at /home/prarit/dummy_module/dummy-module.c:25 init_dummy+0x1f/0x30 [dummy_module]() Kernel panic - not syncing: panic_on_warn set ... CPU: 30 PID: 11698 Comm: insmod Tainted: G W OE 3.17.0+ #57 Hardware name: Intel Corporation S2600CP/S2600CP, BIOS RMLSDP.86I.00.29.D696.1311111329 11/11/2013 0000000000000000 000000008e3f87df ffff88080f093c38 ffffffff81665190 0000000000000000 ffffffff818aea3d ffff88080f093cb8 ffffffff8165e2ec ffffffff00000008 ffff88080f093cc8 ffff88080f093c68 000000008e3f87df Call Trace: [] dump_stack+0x46/0x58 [] panic+0xd0/0x204 [] ? init_dummy+0x1f/0x30 [dummy_module] [] warn_slowpath_common+0xd0/0xd0 [] ? dummy_greetings+0x40/0x40 [dummy_module] [] warn_slowpath_null+0x1a/0x20 [] init_dummy+0x1f/0x30 [dummy_module] [] do_one_initcall+0xd4/0x210 [] ? __vunmap+0xc2/0x110 [] load_module+0x16a9/0x1b30 [] ? store_uevent+0x70/0x70 [] ? copy_module_from_fd.isra.44+0x129/0x180 [] SyS_finit_module+0xa6/0xd0 [] system_call_fastpath+0x12/0x17 Successfully tested by me. hpa said: There is another very valid use for this: many operators would rather a machine shuts down than being potentially compromised either functionally or security-wise. Signed-off-by: Prarit Bhargava Cc: Jonathan Corbet Cc: Rusty Russell Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" Cc: Andi Kleen Cc: Masami Hiramatsu Acked-by: Yasuaki Ishimatsu Cc: Fabian Frederick Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

coredump: add %i/%I in core_pattern to report the tid of the crashed thread

2014-10-14T00:18:21Z

format_corename() can only pass the leader's pid to the core handler, but there is no simple way to figure out which thread originated the coredump. As Jan explains, this also means that there is no simple way to create the backtrace of the crashed process: As programs are mostly compiled with implicit gcc -fomit-frame-pointer one needs program's .eh_frame section (equivalently PT_GNU_EH_FRAME segment) or .debug_frame section. .debug_frame usually is present only in separate debug info files usually not even installed on the system. While .eh_frame is a part of the executable/library (and it is even always mapped for C++ exceptions unwinding) it no longer has to be present anywhere on the disk as the program could be upgraded in the meantime and the running instance has its executable file already unlinked from disk. One possibility is to echo 0x3f >/proc/*/coredump_filter and dump all the file-backed memory including the executable's .eh_frame section. But that can create huge core files, for example even due to mmapped data files. Other possibility would be to read .eh_frame from /proc/PID/mem at the core_pattern handler time of the core dump. For the backtrace one needs to read the register state first which can be done from core_pattern handler: ptrace(PTRACE_SEIZE, tid, 0, PTRACE_O_TRACEEXIT) close(0); // close pipe fd to resume the sleeping dumper waitpid(); // should report EXIT PTRACE_GETREGS or other requests The remaining problem is how to get the 'tid' value of the crashed thread. It could be read from the first NT_PRSTATUS note of the core file but that makes the core_pattern handler complicated. Unfortunately %t is already used so this patch uses %i/%I. Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (https://github.com/abrt/abrt/wiki/overview) is experimenting with this. It is using the elfutils (https://fedorahosted.org/elfutils/) unwinder for generating the backtraces. Apart from not needing matching executables as mentioned above, another advantage is that we can get the backtrace without saving the core (which might be quite large) to disk. [mmilata@redhat.com: final paragraph of changelog] Signed-off-by: Jan Kratochvil Signed-off-by: Oleg Nesterov Cc: Alexander Viro Cc: Denys Vlasenko Cc: Jan Kratochvil Cc: Mark Wielaard Cc: Martin Milata Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

panic: add TAINT_SOFTLOCKUP

2014-08-08T22:57:24Z

This taint flag will be set if the system has ever entered a softlockup state. Similar to TAINT_WARN it is useful to know whether or not the system has been in a softlockup state when debugging. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: apply the taint before calling panic()] Signed-off-by: Josh Hunt Cc: Jason Baron Cc: Randy Dunlap Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

kernel/watchdog.c: print traces for all cpus on lockup detection

2014-06-23T23:47:44Z

A 'softlockup' is defined as a bug that causes the kernel to loop in kernel mode for more than a predefined period to time, without giving other tasks a chance to run. Currently, upon detection of this condition by the per-cpu watchdog task, debug information (including a stack trace) is sent to the system log. On some occasions, we have observed that the "victim" rather than the actual "culprit" (i.e. the owner/holder of the contended resource) is reported to the user. Often this information has proven to be insufficient to assist debugging efforts. To avoid loss of useful debug information, for architectures which support NMI, this patch makes it possible to improve soft lockup reporting. This is accomplished by issuing an NMI to each cpu to obtain a stack trace. If NMI is not supported we just revert back to the old method. A sysctl and boot-time parameter is available to toggle this feature. [dzickus@redhat.com: add CONFIG_SMP in certain areas] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: additional CONFIG_SMP=n optimisations] [mq@suse.cz: fix warning] Signed-off-by: Aaron Tomlin Signed-off-by: Don Zickus Cc: David S. Miller Cc: Mateusz Guzik Cc: Oleg Nesterov Signed-off-by: Jan Moskyto Matejka Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

sysctl: allow for strict write position handling

2014-06-06T23:08:13Z

When writing to a sysctl string, each write, regardless of VFS position, begins writing the string from the start. This means the contents of the last write to the sysctl controls the string contents instead of the first: open("/proc/sys/kernel/modprobe", O_WRONLY) = 1 write(1, "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"..., 4096) = 4096 write(1, "/bin/true", 9) = 9 close(1) = 0 $ cat /proc/sys/kernel/modprobe /bin/true Expected behaviour would be to have the sysctl be "AAAA..." capped at maxlen (in this case KMOD_PATH_LEN: 256), instead of truncating to the contents of the second write. Similarly, multiple short writes would not append to the sysctl. The old behavior is unlike regular POSIX files enough that doing audits of software that interact with sysctls can end up in unexpected or dangerous situations. For example, "as long as the input starts with a trusted path" turns out to be an insufficient filter, as what must also happen is for the input to be entirely contained in a single write syscall -- not a common consideration, especially for high level tools. This provides kernel.sysctl_writes_strict as a way to make this behavior act in a less surprising manner for strings, and disallows non-zero file position when writing numeric sysctls (similar to what is already done when reading from non-zero file positions). For now, the default (0) is to warn about non-zero file position use, but retain the legacy behavior. Setting this to -1 disables the warning, and setting this to 1 enables the file position respecting behavior. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix build] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: move misplaced hunk, per Randy] Signed-off-by: Kees Cook Cc: Randy Dunlap Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

hung_task: check the value of "sysctl_hung_task_timeout_sec"

2014-04-07T23:36:07Z

As sysctl_hung_task_timeout_sec is unsigned long, when this value is larger then LONG_MAX/HZ, the function schedule_timeout_interruptible in watchdog will return immediately without sleep and with print : schedule_timeout: wrong timeout value ffffffffffffff83 and then the funtion watchdog will call schedule_timeout_interruptible again and again. The screen will be filled with "schedule_timeout: wrong timeout value ffffffffffffff83" This patch does some check and correction in sysctl, to let the function schedule_timeout_interruptible allways get the valid parameter. Signed-off-by: Liu Hua Tested-by: Satoru Takeuchi Cc: [3.4+] Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds