kernel: add panic_on_taint

Analogously to the introduction of panic_on_warn, this patch introduces
a kernel option named panic_on_taint in order to provide a simple and
generic way to stop execution and catch a coredump when the kernel gets
tainted by any given flag.

This is useful for debugging sessions as it avoids having to rebuild the
kernel to explicitly add calls to panic() into the code sites that
introduce the taint flags of interest.

For instance, if one is interested in proceeding with a post-mortem
analysis at the point a given code path is hitting a bad page (i.e.
unaccount_page_cache_page(), or slab_bug()), a coredump can be collected
by rebooting the kernel with 'panic_on_taint=0x20' amended to the
command line.

Another, perhaps less frequent, use for this option would be as a means
for assuring a security policy case where only a subset of taints, or no
single taint (in paranoid mode), is allowed for the running system.  The
optional switch 'nousertaint' is handy in this particular scenario, as
it will avoid userspace induced crashes by writes to sysctl interface
/proc/sys/kernel/tainted causing false positive hits for such policies.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: tweak kernel-parameters.txt wording]

Suggested-by: Qian Cai <cai@lca.pw>
Signed-off-by: Rafael Aquini <aquini@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org>
Cc: Dave Young <dyoung@redhat.com>
Cc: Baoquan He <bhe@redhat.com>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Cc: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Adrian Bunk <bunk@kernel.org>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: Laura Abbott <labbott@redhat.com>
Cc: Jeff Mahoney <jeffm@suse.com>
Cc: Jiri Kosina <jikos@kernel.org>
Cc: Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200515175502.146720-1-aquini@redhat.com
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/kdump/kdump.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/kdump/kdump.rst
index ac7e131d2935..2da65fef2a1c 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/kdump/kdump.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/kdump/kdump.rst
@@ -521,6 +521,14 @@ will cause a kdump to occur at the panic() call.  In cases where a user wants
 to specify this during runtime, /proc/sys/kernel/panic_on_warn can be set to 1
 to achieve the same behaviour.
 
+Trigger Kdump on add_taint()
+============================
+
+The kernel parameter panic_on_taint facilitates a conditional call to panic()
+from within add_taint() whenever the value set in this bitmask matches with the
+bit flag being set by add_taint().
+This will cause a kdump to occur at the add_taint()->panic() call.
+
 Contact
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