* Petr Tesarik [off-list ref] wrote:

Dne P? 1. ?ervence 2011 16:46:41 Ingo Molnar napsal(a):

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* Christoph Hellwig [off-list ref] wrote:

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On Fri, Jul 01, 2011 at 04:37:35PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:

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After initial modules have loaded i essentially disable crash.ko
via /proc/sys/kernel/modules_disabled so rootkits have to work a
bit harder than that.

Not sure for fedora as I don'[t have a kernel tree at hand right
now, but for x86 systems at least RHEL6 has the module built in.
[...]

Fedora Rawhide has it modular:

 # grep CRASH /boot/config-2.6.38-0.rc7.git2.3.fc16.x86_64
 CONFIG_CRASH=m

 # rpm -ql kernel-2.6.38-0.rc7.git2.3.fc16.x86_64 | grep crash
 /lib/modules/2.6.38-0.rc7.git2.3.fc16.x86_64/kernel/drivers/char/crash.ko

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[...]  Either way we'll need some way to support crash properly in
mainline, preferably in a boot-time opt-in way. [...]

Yes, boot-time opt-in was what i suggested.

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[...] I'd tend slightly toward optionally enabling /dev/mem for it
instead of a separate driver, but if people prefer a different
route I'm fine, too.

No, sharing the driver is perfectly fine and sane as long as this
weird usage is not enabled widely.

Note that if you want to solve the Fedora case, you want to make 
STRICT_DEVMEM run-time configurable. My patch set does nothing 
about it. It merely tries to fix the highmem deficiency (actually, 
the first patch is a plain bugfix on any architecture where loff_t 
is larger than long).

I'm not focused on Fedora here (i brought it up as an example). I'd 
like to improve upstream, and if that is done Fedora can just go use 
it and symlink /dev/mem to /dev/crash.

The STRICT_DEVMEM logic is implemented in range_is_allowed(), and I 
leave it as-is.

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Note that for normal crash usage read only access is just fine.

That's true as well. Petr?

Yes, that's true. Although there is some write support in crash, I 
have never ever felt the need to use it, and I've been using crash 
a lot in the last 5 years.

If you make it a read-only thing then that removes many of the 
negative aspects of this feature.

Also, does Xorg really need the first 1MB truly write-mapped? Last i 
checked it needed it for the BIOS ...

So we could kill multiple birds with the same stone here:

 - remove various ugly uses of /dev/mem (including the rootkit usage),
   with or without strict-devmem

 - extending it to above-4G for inspection purposes

 - allowing to kill /dev/mem access runtime similar to the 
   disable_modules lock-down killswitch, for the so inclined.

Would you be interested in modifying your patch-set in such a 
fashion?

Thanks,

	Ingo