linux-stable.git/Documentation/sysctl, branch v3.16.75

mnt: Add a per mount namespace limit on the number of mounts

2017-02-26T20:01:48+00:00

commit d29216842a85c7970c536108e093963f02714498 upstream.

CAI Qian  pointed out that the semantics
of shared subtrees make it possible to create an exponentially
increasing number of mounts in a mount namespace.

    mkdir /tmp/1 /tmp/2
    mount --make-rshared /
    for i in $(seq 1 20) ; do mount --bind /tmp/1 /tmp/2 ; done

Will create create 2^20 or 1048576 mounts, which is a practical problem
as some people have managed to hit this by accident.

As such CVE-2016-6213 was assigned.

Ian Kent  described the situation for autofs users
as follows:

> The number of mounts for direct mount maps is usually not very large because of
> the way they are implemented, large direct mount maps can have performance
> problems. There can be anywhere from a few (likely case a few hundred) to less
> than 10000, plus mounts that have been triggered and not yet expired.
>
> Indirect mounts have one autofs mount at the root plus the number of mounts that
> have been triggered and not yet expired.
>
> The number of autofs indirect map entries can range from a few to the common
> case of several thousand and in rare cases up to between 30000 and 50000. I've
> not heard of people with maps larger than 50000 entries.
>
> The larger the number of map entries the greater the possibility for a large
> number of active mounts so it's not hard to expect cases of a 1000 or somewhat
> more active mounts.

So I am setting the default number of mounts allowed per mount
namespace at 100,000.  This is more than enough for any use case I
know of, but small enough to quickly stop an exponential increase
in mounts.  Which should be perfect to catch misconfigurations and
malfunctioning programs.

For anyone who needs a higher limit this can be changed by writing
to the new /proc/sys/fs/mount-max sysctl.

Tested-by: CAI Qian 
Signed-off-by: "Eric W. Biederman" 
[bwh: Backported to 3.16:
 - Use ACCESS_ONCE() instead of READ_ONCE()
 - Adjust context]
Signed-off-by: Ben Hutchings

pipe: limit the per-user amount of pages allocated in pipes

2016-02-25T10:51:03+00:00

commit 759c01142a5d0f364a462346168a56de28a80f52 upstream.

On no-so-small systems, it is possible for a single process to cause an
OOM condition by filling large pipes with data that are never read. A
typical process filling 4000 pipes with 1 MB of data will use 4 GB of
memory. On small systems it may be tricky to set the pipe max size to
prevent this from happening.

This patch makes it possible to enforce a per-user soft limit above
which new pipes will be limited to a single page, effectively limiting
them to 4 kB each, as well as a hard limit above which no new pipes may
be created for this user. This has the effect of protecting the system
against memory abuse without hurting other users, and still allowing
pipes to work correctly though with less data at once.

The limit are controlled by two new sysctls : pipe-user-pages-soft, and
pipe-user-pages-hard. Both may be disabled by setting them to zero. The
default soft limit allows the default number of FDs per process (1024)
to create pipes of the default size (64kB), thus reaching a limit of 64MB
before starting to create only smaller pipes. With 256 processes limited
to 1024 FDs each, this results in 1024*64kB + (256*1024 - 1024) * 4kB =
1084 MB of memory allocated for a user. The hard limit is disabled by
default to avoid breaking existing applications that make intensive use
of pipes (eg: for splicing).

Reported-by: socketpair@gmail.com
Reported-by: Tetsuo Handa 
Mitigates: CVE-2013-4312 (Linux 2.0+)
Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds 
Signed-off-by: Willy Tarreau 
Signed-off-by: Al Viro 
Signed-off-by: Luis Henriques

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

2014-06-23T23:47:44+00:00

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

mm, pcp: allow restoring percpu_pagelist_fraction default

2014-06-23T23:47:43+00:00

Oleg reports a division by zero error on zero-length write() to the
percpu_pagelist_fraction sysctl:

    divide error: 0000 [#1] SMP DEBUG_PAGEALLOC
    CPU: 1 PID: 9142 Comm: badarea_io Not tainted 3.15.0-rc2-vm-nfs+ #19
    Hardware name: Bochs Bochs, BIOS Bochs 01/01/2011
    task: ffff8800d5aeb6e0 ti: ffff8800d87a2000 task.ti: ffff8800d87a2000
    RIP: 0010: percpu_pagelist_fraction_sysctl_handler+0x84/0x120
    RSP: 0018:ffff8800d87a3e78  EFLAGS: 00010246
    RAX: 0000000000000f89 RBX: ffff88011f7fd000 RCX: 0000000000000000
    RDX: 0000000000000000 RSI: 0000000000000001 RDI: 0000000000000010
    RBP: ffff8800d87a3e98 R08: ffffffff81d002c8 R09: ffff8800d87a3f50
    R10: 000000000000000b R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 0000000000000060
    R13: ffffffff81c3c3e0 R14: ffffffff81cfddf8 R15: ffff8801193b0800
    FS:  00007f614f1e9740(0000) GS:ffff88011f440000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000
    CS:  0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 000000008005003b
    CR2: 00007f614f1fa000 CR3: 00000000d9291000 CR4: 00000000000006e0
    Call Trace:
      proc_sys_call_handler+0xb3/0xc0
      proc_sys_write+0x14/0x20
      vfs_write+0xba/0x1e0
      SyS_write+0x46/0xb0
      tracesys+0xe1/0xe6

However, if the percpu_pagelist_fraction sysctl is set by the user, it
is also impossible to restore it to the kernel default since the user
cannot write 0 to the sysctl.

This patch allows the user to write 0 to restore the default behavior.
It still requires a fraction equal to or larger than 8, however, as
stated by the documentation for sanity.  If a value in the range [1, 7]
is written, the sysctl will return EINVAL.

This successfully solves the divide by zero issue at the same time.

Signed-off-by: David Rientjes 
Reported-by: Oleg Drokin 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

sysctl: allow for strict write position handling

2014-06-06T23:08:13+00:00

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

Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt: clarify vfs_cache_pressure description

2014-06-04T23:54:13+00:00

Existing description is worded in a way which almost encourages setting of
vfs_cache_pressure above 100, possibly way above it.

Users are left in a dark what this numeric value is - an int?  a
percentage?  what the scale is?

As a result, we are getting reports about noticeable performance
degradation from users who have set vfs_cache_pressure to ridiculously
high values - because they thought there is no downside to it.

Via code inspection it's obvious that this value is treated as a
percentage.  This patch changes text to reflect this fact, and adds a
cautionary paragraph advising against setting vfs_cache_pressure sky high.

Signed-off-by: Denys Vlasenko 
Cc: Alexander Viro 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: disable zone_reclaim_mode by default

2014-06-04T23:53:59+00:00

When it was introduced, zone_reclaim_mode made sense as NUMA distances
punished and workloads were generally partitioned to fit into a NUMA
node.  NUMA machines are now common but few of the workloads are
NUMA-aware and it's routine to see major performance degradation due to
zone_reclaim_mode being enabled but relatively few can identify the
problem.

Those that require zone_reclaim_mode are likely to be able to detect
when it needs to be enabled and tune appropriately so lets have a
sensible default for the bulk of users.

This patch (of 2):

zone_reclaim_mode causes processes to prefer reclaiming memory from
local node instead of spilling over to other nodes.  This made sense
initially when NUMA machines were almost exclusively HPC and the
workload was partitioned into nodes.  The NUMA penalties were
sufficiently high to justify reclaiming the memory.  On current machines
and workloads it is often the case that zone_reclaim_mode destroys
performance but not all users know how to detect this.  Favour the
common case and disable it by default.  Users that are sophisticated
enough to know they need zone_reclaim_mode will detect it.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner 
Reviewed-by: Zhang Yanfei 
Acked-by: Michal Hocko 
Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

hung_task: check the value of "sysctl_hung_task_timeout_sec"

2014-04-07T23:36:07+00:00

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

Merge tag 'modules-next-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rusty/linux

2014-04-06T16:38:07+00:00

Pull module updates from Rusty Russell:
 "Nothing major: the stricter permissions checking for sysfs broke a
  staging driver; fix included.  Greg KH said he'd take the patch but
  hadn't as the merge window opened, so it's included here to avoid
  breaking build"

* tag 'modules-next-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rusty/linux:
  staging: fix up speakup kobject mode
  Use 'E' instead of 'X' for unsigned module taint flag.
  VERIFY_OCTAL_PERMISSIONS: stricter checking for sysfs perms.
  kallsyms: fix percpu vars on x86-64 with relocation.
  kallsyms: generalize address range checking
  module: LLVMLinux: Remove unused function warning from __param_check macro
  Fix: module signature vs tracepoints: add new TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
  module: remove MODULE_GENERIC_TABLE
  module: allow multiple calls to MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE() per module
  module: use pr_cont

drop_caches: add some documentation and info message

2014-04-03T23:21:04+00:00

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence and a load of blog posts
suggesting that using "drop_caches" periodically keeps your system
running in "tip top shape".  Perhaps adding some kernel documentation
will increase the amount of accurate data on its use.

If we are not shrinking caches effectively, then we have real bugs.
Using drop_caches will simply mask the bugs and make them harder to
find, but certainly does not fix them, nor is it an appropriate
"workaround" to limit the size of the caches.  On the contrary, there
have been bug reports on issues that turned out to be misguided use of
cache dropping.

Dropping caches is a very drastic and disruptive operation that is good
for debugging and running tests, but if it creates bug reports from
production use, kernel developers should be aware of its use.

Add a bit more documentation about it, a syslog message to track down
abusers, and vmstat drop counters to help analyze problem reports.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: checkpatch fixes]
[hannes@cmpxchg.org: add runtime suppression control]
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen 
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko 
Acked-by: KOSAKI Motohiro 
Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki 
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds