kernel: add panic_on_taint
authorRafael Aquini <aquini@redhat.com>
Mon, 8 Jun 2020 04:40:17 +0000 (21:40 -0700)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Mon, 8 Jun 2020 18:05:56 +0000 (11:05 -0700)
commitdb38d5c106dfdd7cb7207c83267d82fdf4950b61
tree1b6d4b08878942fb32dcd6b2faccfd7cf32babb2
parentceabef7dd71720aef58bd182943352c9c307a3de
kernel: add panic_on_taint

Analogously to the introduction of panic_on_warn, this patch introduces
a kernel option named panic_on_taint in order to provide a simple and
generic way to stop execution and catch a coredump when the kernel gets
tainted by any given flag.

This is useful for debugging sessions as it avoids having to rebuild the
kernel to explicitly add calls to panic() into the code sites that
introduce the taint flags of interest.

For instance, if one is interested in proceeding with a post-mortem
analysis at the point a given code path is hitting a bad page (i.e.
unaccount_page_cache_page(), or slab_bug()), a coredump can be collected
by rebooting the kernel with 'panic_on_taint=0x20' amended to the
command line.

Another, perhaps less frequent, use for this option would be as a means
for assuring a security policy case where only a subset of taints, or no
single taint (in paranoid mode), is allowed for the running system.  The
optional switch 'nousertaint' is handy in this particular scenario, as
it will avoid userspace induced crashes by writes to sysctl interface
/proc/sys/kernel/tainted causing false positive hits for such policies.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: tweak kernel-parameters.txt wording]

Suggested-by: Qian Cai <cai@lca.pw>
Signed-off-by: Rafael Aquini <aquini@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org>
Cc: Dave Young <dyoung@redhat.com>
Cc: Baoquan He <bhe@redhat.com>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Cc: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Adrian Bunk <bunk@kernel.org>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: Laura Abbott <labbott@redhat.com>
Cc: Jeff Mahoney <jeffm@suse.com>
Cc: Jiri Kosina <jikos@kernel.org>
Cc: Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200515175502.146720-1-aquini@redhat.com
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Documentation/admin-guide/kdump/kdump.rst
Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/kernel.rst
include/linux/kernel.h
kernel/panic.c
kernel/sysctl.c