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authorYork Jasper Niebuhr <yjnworkstation@gmail.com>2024-03-29 17:56:05 +0300
committerAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>2024-04-26 06:56:29 +0300
commitba42b524a0408b5f92bd41edaee1ea84309ab9ae (patch)
tree486d06613fac993ec46042d48d87c0e39859b565 /Documentation/admin-guide
parent6c47de3be3a021d8b28d127802d590a49598a514 (diff)
downloadlinux-ba42b524a0408b5f92bd41edaee1ea84309ab9ae.tar.xz
mm: init_mlocked_on_free_v3
Implements the "init_mlocked_on_free" boot option. When this boot option is enabled, any mlock'ed pages are zeroed on free. If the pages are munlock'ed beforehand, no initialization takes place. This boot option is meant to combat the performance hit of "init_on_free" as reported in commit 6471384af2a6 ("mm: security: introduce init_on_alloc=1 and init_on_free=1 boot options"). With "init_mlocked_on_free=1" only relevant data is freed while everything else is left untouched by the kernel. Correspondingly, this patch introduces no performance hit for unmapping non-mlock'ed memory. The unmapping overhead for purely mlocked memory was measured to be approximately 13%. Realistically, most systems mlock only a fraction of the total memory so the real-world system overhead should be close to zero. Optimally, userspace programs clear any key material or other confidential memory before exit and munlock the according memory regions. If a program crashes, userspace key managers fail to do this job. Accordingly, no munlock operations are performed so the data is caught and zeroed by the kernel. Should the program not crash, all memory will ideally be munlocked so no overhead is caused. CONFIG_INIT_MLOCKED_ON_FREE_DEFAULT_ON can be set to enable "init_mlocked_on_free" by default. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240329145605.149917-1-yjnworkstation@gmail.com Signed-off-by: York Jasper Niebuhr <yjnworkstation@gmail.com> Cc: Matthew Wilcox (Oracle) <willy@infradead.org> Cc: York Jasper Niebuhr <yjnworkstation@gmail.com> Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/admin-guide')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt6
1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
index 902ecd92a29f..3ff97de349da 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
@@ -2148,6 +2148,12 @@
Format: 0 | 1
Default set by CONFIG_INIT_ON_FREE_DEFAULT_ON.
+ init_mlocked_on_free= [MM] Fill freed userspace memory with zeroes if
+ it was mlock'ed and not explicitly munlock'ed
+ afterwards.
+ Format: 0 | 1
+ Default set by CONFIG_INIT_MLOCKED_ON_FREE_DEFAULT_ON
+
init_pkru= [X86] Specify the default memory protection keys rights
register contents for all processes. 0x55555554 by
default (disallow access to all but pkey 0). Can