linux/drivers/char
David Hildenbrand bbcd53c960 drivers/char: remove /dev/kmem for good
Patch series "drivers/char: remove /dev/kmem for good".

Exploring /dev/kmem and /dev/mem in the context of memory hot(un)plug and
memory ballooning, I started questioning the existence of /dev/kmem.

Comparing it with the /proc/kcore implementation, it does not seem to be
able to deal with things like

a) Pages unmapped from the direct mapping (e.g., to be used by secretmem)
  -> kern_addr_valid(). virt_addr_valid() is not sufficient.

b) Special cases like gart aperture memory that is not to be touched
  -> mem_pfn_is_ram()

Unless I am missing something, it's at least broken in some cases and might
fault/crash the machine.

Looks like its existence has been questioned before in 2005 and 2010 [1],
after ~11 additional years, it might make sense to revive the discussion.

CONFIG_DEVKMEM is only enabled in a single defconfig (on purpose or by
mistake?).  All distributions disable it: in Ubuntu it has been disabled
for more than 10 years, in Debian since 2.6.31, in Fedora at least
starting with FC3, in RHEL starting with RHEL4, in SUSE starting from
15sp2, and OpenSUSE has it disabled as well.

1) /dev/kmem was popular for rootkits [2] before it got disabled
   basically everywhere. Ubuntu documents [3] "There is no modern user of
   /dev/kmem any more beyond attackers using it to load kernel rootkits.".
   RHEL documents in a BZ [5] "it served no practical purpose other than to
   serve as a potential security problem or to enable binary module drivers
   to access structures/functions they shouldn't be touching"

2) /proc/kcore is a decent interface to have a controlled way to read
   kernel memory for debugging puposes. (will need some extensions to
   deal with memory offlining/unplug, memory ballooning, and poisoned
   pages, though)

3) It might be useful for corner case debugging [1]. KDB/KGDB might be a
   better fit, especially, to write random memory; harder to shoot
   yourself into the foot.

4) "Kernel Memory Editor" [4] hasn't seen any updates since 2000 and seems
   to be incompatible with 64bit [1]. For educational purposes,
   /proc/kcore might be used to monitor value updates -- or older
   kernels can be used.

5) It's broken on arm64, and therefore, completely disabled there.

Looks like it's essentially unused and has been replaced by better
suited interfaces for individual tasks (/proc/kcore, KDB/KGDB). Let's
just remove it.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/147901/
[2] https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10505
[3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Features#A.2Fdev.2Fkmem_disabled
[4] https://sourceforge.net/projects/kme/
[5] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=154796

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210324102351.6932-1-david@redhat.com
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210324102351.6932-2-david@redhat.com
Signed-off-by: David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Acked-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: "Alexander A. Klimov" <grandmaster@al2klimov.de>
Cc: Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Alexandre Belloni <alexandre.belloni@bootlin.com>
Cc: Andrew Lunn <andrew@lunn.ch>
Cc: Andrey Zhizhikin <andrey.zhizhikin@leica-geosystems.com>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Cc: Brian Cain <bcain@codeaurora.org>
Cc: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@de.ibm.com>
Cc: Christophe Leroy <christophe.leroy@csgroup.eu>
Cc: Chris Zankel <chris@zankel.net>
Cc: Corentin Labbe <clabbe@baylibre.com>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>
Cc: Gerald Schaefer <gerald.schaefer@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: Greentime Hu <green.hu@gmail.com>
Cc: Gregory Clement <gregory.clement@bootlin.com>
Cc: Heiko Carstens <hca@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: Helge Deller <deller@gmx.de>
Cc: Hillf Danton <hdanton@sina.com>
Cc: huang ying <huang.ying.caritas@gmail.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Cc: Ivan Kokshaysky <ink@jurassic.park.msu.ru>
Cc: "James E.J. Bottomley" <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>
Cc: James Troup <james.troup@canonical.com>
Cc: Jiaxun Yang <jiaxun.yang@flygoat.com>
Cc: Jonas Bonn <jonas@southpole.se>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Kairui Song <kasong@redhat.com>
Cc: Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzk@kernel.org>
Cc: Kuninori Morimoto <kuninori.morimoto.gx@renesas.com>
Cc: Liviu Dudau <liviu.dudau@arm.com>
Cc: Lorenzo Pieralisi <lorenzo.pieralisi@arm.com>
Cc: Luc Van Oostenryck <luc.vanoostenryck@gmail.com>
Cc: Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: Matt Turner <mattst88@gmail.com>
Cc: Max Filippov <jcmvbkbc@gmail.com>
Cc: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
Cc: Mike Rapoport <rppt@kernel.org>
Cc: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Niklas Schnelle <schnelle@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: Oleksiy Avramchenko <oleksiy.avramchenko@sonymobile.com>
Cc: openrisc@lists.librecores.org
Cc: Palmer Dabbelt <palmerdabbelt@google.com>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: "Pavel Machek (CIP)" <pavel@denx.de>
Cc: Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
Cc: "Peter Zijlstra (Intel)" <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Pierre Morel <pmorel@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Cc: Richard Henderson <rth@twiddle.net>
Cc: Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>
Cc: Robert Richter <rric@kernel.org>
Cc: Rob Herring <robh@kernel.org>
Cc: Russell King <linux@armlinux.org.uk>
Cc: Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org>
Cc: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>
Cc: Sebastian Hesselbarth <sebastian.hesselbarth@gmail.com>
Cc: sparclinux@vger.kernel.org
Cc: Stafford Horne <shorne@gmail.com>
Cc: Stefan Kristiansson <stefan.kristiansson@saunalahti.fi>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: Sudeep Holla <sudeep.holla@arm.com>
Cc: Theodore Dubois <tblodt@icloud.com>
Cc: Thomas Bogendoerfer <tsbogend@alpha.franken.de>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Vasily Gorbik <gor@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@linaro.org>
Cc: William Cohen <wcohen@redhat.com>
Cc: Xiaoming Ni <nixiaoming@huawei.com>
Cc: Yoshinori Sato <ysato@users.sourceforge.jp>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2021-05-07 00:26:34 -07:00
..
agp parisc: parisc-agp requires SBA IOMMU driver 2021-04-06 11:46:39 +02:00
hw_random Merge branch 'linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/herbert/crypto-2.6 2021-04-26 08:51:23 -07:00
ipmi A bunch of little cleanups 2021-04-28 15:54:57 -07:00
mwave char/mwave: turn tp3780I_Cleanup() into void function 2021-03-24 08:26:30 +01:00
pcmcia pcmcia: synclink_cs: drop redundant tty-port initialisation 2021-04-07 17:22:07 +02:00
tpm char: tpm: fix error return code in tpm_cr50_i2c_tis_recv() 2021-04-14 16:30:30 +03:00
xilinx_hwicap treewide: Add SPDX license identifier - Makefile/Kconfig 2019-05-21 10:50:46 +02:00
xillybus char: xillybus: use devm_platform_ioremap_resource() to simplify code 2019-11-05 18:29:21 +01:00
adi.c
apm-emulation.c treewide: Add SPDX license identifier for more missed files 2019-05-21 10:50:45 +02:00
applicom.c Merge 5.12-rc6 into char-misc-next 2021-04-05 08:43:50 +02:00
applicom.h
bsr.c mm: don't include asm/pgtable.h if linux/mm.h is already included 2020-06-09 09:39:13 -07:00
ds1620.c treewide: Add SPDX license identifier for more missed files 2019-05-21 10:50:45 +02:00
dsp56k.c
dtlk.c treewide: Add SPDX license identifier for more missed files 2019-05-21 10:50:45 +02:00
hangcheck-timer.c treewide: Replace GPLv2 boilerplate/reference with SPDX - rule 405 2019-06-05 17:37:13 +02:00
hpet.c char: hpet: Fix out-of-bounds read bug 2020-01-30 06:58:33 +01:00
Kconfig drivers/char: remove /dev/kmem for good 2021-05-07 00:26:34 -07:00
lp.c char: lp: remove redundant space around (inside) parenthesized expressions 2021-03-24 08:26:32 +01:00
Makefile rtc/alpha: remove legacy rtc driver 2020-03-19 07:41:02 +01:00
mem.c drivers/char: remove /dev/kmem for good 2021-05-07 00:26:34 -07:00
misc.c char: misc: increase DYNAMIC_MINORS value 2020-11-03 09:52:04 +01:00
mspec.c char: mspec: Use kvzalloc() in mspec_mmap() 2020-08-28 12:10:04 +02:00
nsc_gpio.c treewide: Add SPDX license identifier for more missed files 2019-05-21 10:50:45 +02:00
nvram.c treewide: Use fallthrough pseudo-keyword 2020-08-23 17:36:59 -05:00
nwbutton.c treewide: Add SPDX license identifier for more missed files 2019-05-21 10:50:45 +02:00
nwbutton.h misc: cleanup minor number definitions in c file into miscdevice.h 2020-03-18 12:27:03 +01:00
nwflash.c misc: move FLASH_MINOR into miscdevice.h and fix conflicts 2020-03-18 12:27:04 +01:00
pc8736x_gpio.c treewide: Add SPDX license identifier for more missed files 2019-05-21 10:50:45 +02:00
powernv-op-panel.c treewide: Add SPDX license identifier for more missed files 2019-05-21 10:50:45 +02:00
ppdev.c ppdev: Distribute switch variables for initialization 2020-02-23 20:28:12 +01:00
ps3flash.c powerpc/ps3: make system bus's remove and shutdown callbacks return void 2020-12-04 01:01:22 +11:00
random.c random: remove dead code left over from blocking pool 2021-04-02 18:28:12 +11:00
raw.c raw: don't keep unopened block device around 2020-09-23 10:43:19 -06:00
scx200_gpio.c treewide: Add SPDX license identifier for more missed files 2019-05-21 10:50:45 +02:00
sonypi.c treewide: Replace GPLv2 boilerplate/reference with SPDX - rule 61 2019-05-24 17:36:45 +02:00
tb0219.c treewide: Replace GPLv2 boilerplate/reference with SPDX - rule 156 2019-05-30 11:26:35 -07:00
tlclk.c drivers: char: tlclk.c: Avoid data race between init and interrupt handler 2020-04-23 16:55:24 +02:00
toshiba.c module: remove never implemented MODULE_SUPPORTED_DEVICE 2021-03-17 13:16:18 -07:00
ttyprintk.c ttyprintk: Add TTY hangup callback. 2021-04-22 12:01:26 +02:00
uv_mmtimer.c
virtio_console.c virtio_console: remove pointless check for debugfs_create_dir() 2021-03-10 09:21:02 +01:00