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mm, slub: make some slub_debug related attributes read-only
SLUB_DEBUG creates several files under /sys/kernel/slab/<cache>/ that can be read to check if the respective debugging options are enabled for given cache. The options can be also toggled at runtime by writing into the files. Some of those, namely red_zone, poison, and store_user can be toggled only when no objects yet exist in the cache. Vijayanand reports [1] that there is a problem with freelist randomization if changing the debugging option's state results in different number of objects per page, and the random sequence cache needs thus needs to be recomputed. However, another problem is that the check for "no objects yet exist in the cache" is racy, as noted by Jann [2] and fixing that would add overhead or otherwise complicate the allocation/freeing paths. Thus it would be much simpler just to remove the runtime toggling support. The documentation describes it's "In case you forgot to enable debugging on the kernel command line", but the neccessity of having no objects limits its usefulness anyway for many caches. Vijayanand describes an use case [3] where debugging is enabled for all but zram caches for memory overhead reasons, and using the runtime toggles was the only way to achieve such configuration. After the previous patch it's now possible to do that directly from the kernel boot option, so we can remove the dangerous runtime toggles by making the /sys attribute files read-only. While updating it, also improve the documentation of the debugging /sys files. [1] https://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected] [2] https://lore.kernel.org/r/CAG48ez31PP--h6_FzVyfJ4H86QYczAFPdxtJHUEEan+7VJETAQ@mail.gmail.com [3] https://lore.kernel.org/r/[email protected] Reported-by: Vijayanand Jitta <[email protected]> Reported-by: Jann Horn <[email protected]> Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <[email protected]> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]> Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <[email protected]> Acked-by: Roman Gushchin <[email protected]> Cc: Christoph Lameter <[email protected]> Cc: David Rientjes <[email protected]> Cc: Joonsoo Kim <[email protected]> Cc: Pekka Enberg <[email protected]> Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected] Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
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