Files
Lokesh Gidra aa3739742f UPSTREAM: userfaultfd: add user-mode only option to unprivileged_userfaultfd sysctl knob
With this change, when the knob is set to 0, it allows unprivileged users
to call userfaultfd, like when it is set to 1, but with the restriction
that page faults from only user-mode can be handled.  In this mode, an
unprivileged user (without SYS_CAP_PTRACE capability) must pass
UFFD_USER_MODE_ONLY to userfaultd or the API will fail with EPERM.

This enables administrators to reduce the likelihood that an attacker with
access to userfaultfd can delay faulting kernel code to widen timing
windows for other exploits.

The default value of this knob is changed to 0.  This is required for
correct functioning of pipe mutex.  However, this will fail postcopy live
migration, which will be unnoticeable to the VM guests.  To avoid this,
set 'vm.userfault = 1' in /sys/sysctl.conf.

The main reason this change is desirable as in the short term is that the
Android userland will behave as with the sysctl set to zero.  So without
this commit, any Linux binary using userfaultfd to manage its memory would
behave differently if run within the Android userland.  For more details,
refer to Andrea's reply [1].

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200904033438.GI9411@redhat.com/

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20201120030411.2690816-3-lokeshgidra@google.com
Signed-off-by: Lokesh Gidra <lokeshgidra@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Peter Xu <peterx@redhat.com>
Cc: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>
Cc: Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Stephen Smalley <stephen.smalley.work@gmail.com>
Cc: Eric Biggers <ebiggers@kernel.org>
Cc: Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>
Cc: "Joel Fernandes (Google)" <joel@joelfernandes.org>
Cc: Kalesh Singh <kaleshsingh@google.com>
Cc: Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@google.com>
Cc: Jeff Vander Stoep <jeffv@google.com>
Cc: <calin@google.com>
Cc: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shli@fb.com>
Cc: Jerome Glisse <jglisse@redhat.com>
Cc: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc: Nitin Gupta <nigupta@nvidia.com>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Iurii Zaikin <yzaikin@google.com>
Cc: Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org>
Cc: Daniel Colascione <dancol@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
(cherry picked from commit d0d4730ac2e404a5b0da9a87ef38c73e51cb1664)
Signed-off-by: Lokesh Gidra <lokeshgidra@google.com>
Bug: 160737021
Bug: 169683130
Change-Id: Ic46c0be47d6394d25bd3443ff524936fa568ab85
2025-09-20 01:45:45 +01:00
..
2023-06-21 15:39:57 +02:00

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/admin-guide/binfmt-misc.rst>
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 :-)