Josh Poimboeuf 0ee1dd9f5e x86/dumpstack: Remove raw stack dump
For mostly historical reasons, the x86 oops dump shows the raw stack
values:

  ...
  [registers]
  Stack:
   ffff880079af7350 ffff880079905400 0000000000000000 ffffc900008f3ae0
   ffffffffa0196610 0000000000000001 00010000ffffffff 0000000087654321
   0000000000000002 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000
  Call Trace:
  ...

This seems to be an artifact from long ago, and probably isn't needed
anymore.  It generally just adds noise to the dump, and it can be
actively harmful because it leaks kernel addresses.

Linus says:

  "The stack dump actually goes back to forever, and it used to be
   useful back in 1992 or so. But it used to be useful mainly because
   stacks were simpler and we didn't have very good call traces anyway. I
   definitely remember having used them - I just do not remember having
   used them in the last ten+ years.

   Of course, it's still true that if you can trigger an oops, you've
   likely already lost the security game, but since the stack dump is so
   useless, let's aim to just remove it and make games like the above
   harder."

This also removes the related 'kstack=' cmdline option and the
'kstack_depth_to_print' sysctl.

Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Cc: Brian Gerst <brgerst@gmail.com>
Cc: Denys Vlasenko <dvlasenk@redhat.com>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/e83bd50df52d8fe88e94d2566426ae40d813bf8f.1477405374.git.jpoimboe@redhat.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
2016-10-25 18:40:37 +02:00
..
2011-01-13 08:03:18 -08:00
2005-04-16 15:20:36 -07:00
2005-04-16 15:20:36 -07:00

Documentation for /proc/sys/		kernel version 2.2.10
	(c) 1998, 1999,  Rik van Riel <riel@nl.linux.org>

'Why', I hear you ask, 'would anyone even _want_ documentation
for them sysctl files? If anybody really needs it, it's all in
the source...'

Well, this documentation is written because some people either
don't know they need to tweak something, or because they don't
have the time or knowledge to read the source code.

Furthermore, the programmers who built sysctl have built it to
be actually used, not just for the fun of programming it :-)

==============================================================

Legal blurb:

As usual, there are two main things to consider:
1. you get what you pay for
2. it's free

The consequences are that I won't guarantee the correctness of
this document, and if you come to me complaining about how you
screwed up your system because of wrong documentation, I won't
feel sorry for you. I might even laugh at you...

But of course, if you _do_ manage to screw up your system using
only the sysctl options used in this file, I'd like to hear of
it. Not only to have a great laugh, but also to make sure that
you're the last RTFMing person to screw up.

In short, e-mail your suggestions, corrections and / or horror
stories to: <riel@nl.linux.org>

Rik van Riel.

==============================================================

Introduction:

Sysctl is a means of configuring certain aspects of the kernel
at run-time, and the /proc/sys/ directory is there so that you
don't even need special tools to do it!
In fact, there are only four things needed to use these config
facilities:
- a running Linux system
- root access
- common sense (this is especially hard to come by these days)
- knowledge of what all those values mean

As a quick 'ls /proc/sys' will show, the directory consists of
several (arch-dependent?) subdirs. Each subdir is mainly about
one part of the kernel, so you can do configuration on a piece
by piece basis, or just some 'thematic frobbing'.

The subdirs are about:
abi/		execution domains & personalities
debug/		<empty>
dev/		device specific information (eg dev/cdrom/info)
fs/		specific filesystems
		filehandle, inode, dentry and quota tuning
		binfmt_misc <Documentation/binfmt_misc.txt>
kernel/		global kernel info / tuning
		miscellaneous stuff
net/		networking stuff, for documentation look in:
		<Documentation/networking/>
proc/		<empty>
sunrpc/		SUN Remote Procedure Call (NFS)
vm/		memory management tuning
		buffer and cache management
user/		Per user per user namespace limits

These are the subdirs I have on my system. There might be more
or other subdirs in another setup. If you see another dir, I'd
really like to hear about it :-)