From bbcd53c960713507ae764bf81970651b5577b95a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: David Hildenbrand Date: Thu, 6 May 2021 18:05:55 -0700 Subject: drivers/char: remove /dev/kmem for good Patch series "drivers/char: remove /dev/kmem for good". Exploring /dev/kmem and /dev/mem in the context of memory hot(un)plug and memory ballooning, I started questioning the existence of /dev/kmem. Comparing it with the /proc/kcore implementation, it does not seem to be able to deal with things like a) Pages unmapped from the direct mapping (e.g., to be used by secretmem) -> kern_addr_valid(). virt_addr_valid() is not sufficient. b) Special cases like gart aperture memory that is not to be touched -> mem_pfn_is_ram() Unless I am missing something, it's at least broken in some cases and might fault/crash the machine. Looks like its existence has been questioned before in 2005 and 2010 [1], after ~11 additional years, it might make sense to revive the discussion. CONFIG_DEVKMEM is only enabled in a single defconfig (on purpose or by mistake?). All distributions disable it: in Ubuntu it has been disabled for more than 10 years, in Debian since 2.6.31, in Fedora at least starting with FC3, in RHEL starting with RHEL4, in SUSE starting from 15sp2, and OpenSUSE has it disabled as well. 1) /dev/kmem was popular for rootkits [2] before it got disabled basically everywhere. Ubuntu documents [3] "There is no modern user of /dev/kmem any more beyond attackers using it to load kernel rootkits.". RHEL documents in a BZ [5] "it served no practical purpose other than to serve as a potential security problem or to enable binary module drivers to access structures/functions they shouldn't be touching" 2) /proc/kcore is a decent interface to have a controlled way to read kernel memory for debugging puposes. (will need some extensions to deal with memory offlining/unplug, memory ballooning, and poisoned pages, though) 3) It might be useful for corner case debugging [1]. KDB/KGDB might be a better fit, especially, to write random memory; harder to shoot yourself into the foot. 4) "Kernel Memory Editor" [4] hasn't seen any updates since 2000 and seems to be incompatible with 64bit [1]. For educational purposes, /proc/kcore might be used to monitor value updates -- or older kernels can be used. 5) It's broken on arm64, and therefore, completely disabled there. Looks like it's essentially unused and has been replaced by better suited interfaces for individual tasks (/proc/kcore, KDB/KGDB). Let's just remove it. [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/147901/ [2] https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10505 [3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Features#A.2Fdev.2Fkmem_disabled [4] https://sourceforge.net/projects/kme/ [5] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=154796 Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210324102351.6932-1-david@redhat.com Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210324102351.6932-2-david@redhat.com Signed-off-by: David Hildenbrand Acked-by: Michal Hocko Acked-by: Kees Cook Cc: Linus Torvalds Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman Cc: "Alexander A. Klimov" Cc: Alexander Viro Cc: Alexandre Belloni Cc: Andrew Lunn Cc: Andrey Zhizhikin Cc: Arnd Bergmann Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt Cc: Brian Cain Cc: Christian Borntraeger Cc: Christophe Leroy Cc: Chris Zankel Cc: Corentin Labbe Cc: "David S. Miller" Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" Cc: Geert Uytterhoeven Cc: Gerald Schaefer Cc: Greentime Hu Cc: Gregory Clement Cc: Heiko Carstens Cc: Helge Deller Cc: Hillf Danton Cc: huang ying Cc: Ingo Molnar Cc: Ivan Kokshaysky Cc: "James E.J. Bottomley" Cc: James Troup Cc: Jiaxun Yang Cc: Jonas Bonn Cc: Jonathan Corbet Cc: Kairui Song Cc: Krzysztof Kozlowski Cc: Kuninori Morimoto Cc: Liviu Dudau Cc: Lorenzo Pieralisi Cc: Luc Van Oostenryck Cc: Luis Chamberlain Cc: Matthew Wilcox Cc: Matt Turner Cc: Max Filippov Cc: Michael Ellerman Cc: Mike Rapoport Cc: Mikulas Patocka Cc: Minchan Kim Cc: Niklas Schnelle Cc: Oleksiy Avramchenko Cc: openrisc@lists.librecores.org Cc: Palmer Dabbelt Cc: Paul Mackerras Cc: "Pavel Machek (CIP)" Cc: Pavel Machek Cc: "Peter Zijlstra (Intel)" Cc: Pierre Morel Cc: Randy Dunlap Cc: Richard Henderson Cc: Rich Felker Cc: Robert Richter Cc: Rob Herring Cc: Russell King Cc: Sam Ravnborg Cc: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior Cc: Sebastian Hesselbarth Cc: sparclinux@vger.kernel.org Cc: Stafford Horne Cc: Stefan Kristiansson Cc: Steven Rostedt Cc: Sudeep Holla Cc: Theodore Dubois Cc: Thomas Bogendoerfer Cc: Thomas Gleixner Cc: Vasily Gorbik Cc: Viresh Kumar Cc: William Cohen Cc: Xiaoming Ni Cc: Yoshinori Sato Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- arch/arm/configs/dove_defconfig | 1 - 1 file changed, 1 deletion(-) (limited to 'arch/arm/configs/dove_defconfig') diff --git a/arch/arm/configs/dove_defconfig b/arch/arm/configs/dove_defconfig index e70c997d5f4c..b935162a8bba 100644 --- a/arch/arm/configs/dove_defconfig +++ b/arch/arm/configs/dove_defconfig @@ -63,7 +63,6 @@ CONFIG_INPUT_EVDEV=y # CONFIG_MOUSE_PS2 is not set # CONFIG_SERIO is not set CONFIG_LEGACY_PTY_COUNT=16 -# CONFIG_DEVKMEM is not set CONFIG_SERIAL_8250=y CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_CONSOLE=y CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_RUNTIME_UARTS=2 -- cgit v1.2.3