• Chris Down's avatar
    x86/msr: Prevent userspace MSR access from dominating the console · 1f35c9c0
    Chris Down authored
    Applications which manipulate MSRs from userspace often do so
    infrequently, and all at once. As such, the default printk ratelimit
    architecture supplied by pr_err_ratelimited() doesn't do enough to prevent
    kmsg becoming completely overwhelmed with their messages and pushing
    other salient information out of the circular buffer.
    
    In one case, I saw over 80% of kmsg being filled with these messages,
    and the default kmsg buffer being completely filled less than 5 minutes
    after boot(!).
    
    Make things much less aggressive, while still achieving the original
    goal of fiter_write(). Operators will still get warnings that MSRs are
    being manipulated from userspace, but they won't have other also
    potentially useful messages pushed out of the kmsg buffer.
    
    Of course, one can boot with `allow_writes=1` to avoid these messages at
    all, but that then has the downfall that one doesn't get _any_
    notification at all about these problems in the first place, and so is
    much less likely to forget to fix it.
    
    One might rather it was less binary: it was still logged, just less
    often, so that application developers _do_ have the incentive to improve
    their current methods, without the kernel having to push other useful
    stuff out of the kmsg buffer.
    
    This one example isn't the point, of course: I'm sure there are plenty
    of other non-ideal-but-pragmatic cases where people are writing to MSRs
    from userspace right now, and it will take time for those people to find
    other solutions.
    
    Overall, keep the intent of the original patch, while mitigating its
    sometimes heavy effects on kmsg composition.
    
     [ bp: Massage a bit. ]
    Signed-off-by: default avatarChris Down <chris@chrisdown.name>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarBorislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
    Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/563994ef132ce6cffd28fc659254ca37d032b5ef.1598011595.git.chris@chrisdown.name
    1f35c9c0
msr.c 7 KB