linux/Documentation/sysctl, branch v3.16

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

2014-06-23T23:47:44Z

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

2014-06-23T23:47:43Z

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

2014-06-06T23:08:13Z

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

2014-06-04T23:54:13Z

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

2014-06-04T23:53:59Z

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"

2014-04-07T23:36:07Z

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

2014-04-06T16:38:07Z

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

2014-04-03T23:21:04Z

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

Merge branch 'sched-core-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip

2014-03-31T18:21:19Z

Pull scheduler changes from Ingo Molnar: "Bigger changes: - sched/idle restructuring: they are WIP preparation for deeper integration between the scheduler and idle state selection, by Nicolas Pitre. - add NUMA scheduling pseudo-interleaving, by Rik van Riel. - optimize cgroup context switches, by Peter Zijlstra. - RT scheduling enhancements, by Thomas Gleixner. The rest is smaller changes, non-urgnt fixes and cleanups" * 'sched-core-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip: (68 commits) sched: Clean up the task_hot() function sched: Remove double calculation in fix_small_imbalance() sched: Fix broken setscheduler() sparc64, sched: Remove unused sparc64_multi_core sched: Remove unused mc_capable() and smt_capable() sched/numa: Move task_numa_free() to __put_task_struct() sched/fair: Fix endless loop in idle_balance() sched/core: Fix endless loop in pick_next_task() sched/fair: Push down check for high priority class task into idle_balance() sched/rt: Fix picking RT and DL tasks from empty queue trace: Replace hardcoding of 19 with MAX_NICE sched: Guarantee task priority in pick_next_task() sched/idle: Remove stale old file sched: Put rq's sched_avg under CONFIG_FAIR_GROUP_SCHED cpuidle/arm64: Remove redundant cpuidle_idle_call() cpuidle/powernv: Remove redundant cpuidle_idle_call() sched, nohz: Exclude isolated cores from load balancing sched: Fix select_task_rq_fair() description comments workqueue: Replace hardcoding of -20 and 19 with MIN_NICE and MAX_NICE sys: Replace hardcoding of -20 and 19 with MIN_NICE and MAX_NICE ...

Fix: module signature vs tracepoints: add new TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE

2014-03-13T01:41:51Z

Users have reported being unable to trace non-signed modules loaded within a kernel supporting module signature. This is caused by tracepoint.c:tracepoint_module_coming() refusing to take into account tracepoints sitting within force-loaded modules (TAINT_FORCED_MODULE). The reason for this check, in the first place, is that a force-loaded module may have a struct module incompatible with the layout expected by the kernel, and can thus cause a kernel crash upon forced load of that module on a kernel with CONFIG_TRACEPOINTS=y. Tracepoints, however, specifically accept TAINT_OOT_MODULE and TAINT_CRAP, since those modules do not lead to the "very likely system crash" issue cited above for force-loaded modules. With kernels having CONFIG_MODULE_SIG=y (signed modules), a non-signed module is tainted re-using the TAINT_FORCED_MODULE taint flag. Unfortunately, this means that Tracepoints treat that module as a force-loaded module, and thus silently refuse to consider any tracepoint within this module. Since an unsigned module does not fit within the "very likely system crash" category of tainting, add a new TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE taint flag to specifically address this taint behavior, and accept those modules within Tracepoints. We use the letter 'X' as a taint flag character for a module being loaded that doesn't know how to sign its name (proposed by Steven Rostedt). Also add the missing 'O' entry to trace event show_module_flags() list for the sake of completeness. Signed-off-by: Mathieu Desnoyers Acked-by: Steven Rostedt NAKed-by: Ingo Molnar CC: Thomas Gleixner CC: David Howells CC: Greg Kroah-Hartman Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell