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Commit 750afe7b authored by Borislav Petkov's avatar Borislav Petkov Committed by Linus Torvalds
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printk: add kernel parameter to control writes to /dev/kmsg

Add a "printk.devkmsg" kernel command line parameter which controls how
userspace writes into /dev/kmsg.  It has three options:

 * ratelimit - ratelimit logging from userspace.
 * on  - unlimited logging from userspace
 * off - logging from userspace gets ignored

The default setting is to ratelimit the messages written to it.

This changes the kernel default setting of "on" to "ratelimit" and we do
that because we want to keep userspace spamming /dev/kmsg to sane
levels.  This is especially moot when a small kernel log buffer wraps
around and messages get lost.  So the ratelimiting setting should be a
sane setting where kernel messages should have a bit higher chance of
survival from all the spamming.

It additionally does not limit logging to /dev/kmsg while the system is
booting if we haven't disabled it on the command line.

Furthermore, we can control the logging from a lower priority sysctl
interface - kernel.printk_devkmsg.

That interface will succeed only if printk.devkmsg *hasn't* been
supplied on the command line.  If it has, then printk.devkmsg is a
one-time setting which remains for the duration of the system lifetime.
This "locking" of the setting is to prevent userspace from changing the
logging on us through sysctl(2).

This patch is based on previous patches from Linus and Steven.

[bp@suse.de: fixes]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160719072344.GC25563@nazgul.tnic
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160716061745.15795-3-bp@alien8.de


Signed-off-by: default avatarBorislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Cc: Dave Young <dyoung@redhat.com>
Cc: Franck Bui <fbui@suse.com>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: Uwe Kleine-König <u.kleine-koenig@pengutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
parent 6b1d174b
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