ftrace: limit trace entries

Currently there is no protection from the root user to use up all of
memory for trace buffers. If the root user allocates too many entries,
the OOM killer might start kill off all tasks.

This patch adds an algorith to check the following condition:

 pages_requested > (freeable_memory + current_trace_buffer_pages) / 4

If the above is met then the allocation fails. The above prevents more
than 1/4th of freeable memory from being used by trace buffers.

To determine the freeable_memory, I made determine_dirtyable_memory in
mm/page-writeback.c global.

Special thanks goes to Peter Zijlstra for suggesting the above calculation.

Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt <srostedt@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/mm/page-writeback.c b/mm/page-writeback.c
index 789b6adbef37..b38f700825fc 100644
--- a/mm/page-writeback.c
+++ b/mm/page-writeback.c
@@ -126,8 +126,6 @@ static void background_writeout(unsigned long _min_pages);
 static struct prop_descriptor vm_completions;
 static struct prop_descriptor vm_dirties;
 
-static unsigned long determine_dirtyable_memory(void);
-
 /*
  * couple the period to the dirty_ratio:
  *
@@ -347,7 +345,13 @@ static unsigned long highmem_dirtyable_memory(unsigned long total)
 #endif
 }
 
-static unsigned long determine_dirtyable_memory(void)
+/**
+ * determine_dirtyable_memory - amount of memory that may be used
+ *
+ * Returns the numebr of pages that can currently be freed and used
+ * by the kernel for direct mappings.
+ */
+unsigned long determine_dirtyable_memory(void)
 {
 	unsigned long x;