Having automatic updates seems pointless for production system, and even dangerous and thus counter-productive:
1. If we can mount pstore, or read files, we can as well read /proc/kmsg. So, there's little point in duplicating the functionality and present the same information but via another userland ABI;
2. Expecting the kernel to behave sanely after oops/panic is naive. It might work, but you'd rather not try it. Screwed up kernel can do rather bad things, like recursive faults[1]; and pstore rather provoking bad things to happen. It uses:
1. Timers (assumes sane interrupts state); 2. Workqueues and mutexes (assumes scheduler in a sane state); 3. kzalloc (a working slab allocator);
That's too much for a dead kernel, so the debugging facility itself might just make debugging harder, which is not what we want.
Maybe for non-oops message types it would make sense to re-enable automatic updates, but so far I don't see any use case for this. Even for tracing, it has its own run-time/normal ABI, so we're only interested in pstore upon next boot, to retrieve what has gone wrong with HW or SW.
So, let's disable the updates by default.
[1] BUG: unable to handle kernel paging request at fffffffffffffff8 IP: [<ffffffff8104801b>] kthread_data+0xb/0x20 [...] Process kworker/0:1 (pid: 14, threadinfo ffff8800072c0000, task ffff88000725b100) [... Call Trace: [<ffffffff81043710>] wq_worker_sleeping+0x10/0xa0 [<ffffffff813687a8>] __schedule+0x568/0x7d0 [<ffffffff8106c24d>] ? trace_hardirqs_on+0xd/0x10 [<ffffffff81087e22>] ? call_rcu_sched+0x12/0x20 [<ffffffff8102b596>] ? release_task+0x156/0x2d0 [<ffffffff8102b45e>] ? release_task+0x1e/0x2d0 [<ffffffff8106c24d>] ? trace_hardirqs_on+0xd/0x10 [<ffffffff81368ac4>] schedule+0x24/0x70 [<ffffffff8102cba8>] do_exit+0x1f8/0x370 [<ffffffff810051e7>] oops_end+0x77/0xb0 [<ffffffff8135c301>] no_context+0x1a6/0x1b5 [<ffffffff8135c4de>] __bad_area_nosemaphore+0x1ce/0x1ed [<ffffffff81053156>] ? ttwu_queue+0xc6/0xe0 [<ffffffff8135c50b>] bad_area_nosemaphore+0xe/0x10 [<ffffffff8101fa47>] do_page_fault+0x2c7/0x450 [<ffffffff8106e34b>] ? __lock_release+0x6b/0xe0 [<ffffffff8106bf21>] ? mark_held_locks+0x61/0x140 [<ffffffff810502fe>] ? __wake_up+0x4e/0x70 [<ffffffff81185f7d>] ? trace_hardirqs_off_thunk+0x3a/0x3c [<ffffffff81158970>] ? pstore_register+0x120/0x120 [<ffffffff8136a37f>] page_fault+0x1f/0x30 [<ffffffff81158970>] ? pstore_register+0x120/0x120 [<ffffffff81185ab8>] ? memcpy+0x68/0x110 [<ffffffff8115875a>] ? pstore_get_records+0x3a/0x130 [<ffffffff811590f4>] ? persistent_ram_copy_old+0x64/0x90 [<ffffffff81158bf4>] ramoops_pstore_read+0x84/0x130 [<ffffffff81158799>] pstore_get_records+0x79/0x130 [<ffffffff81042536>] ? process_one_work+0x116/0x450 [<ffffffff81158970>] ? pstore_register+0x120/0x120 [<ffffffff8115897e>] pstore_dowork+0xe/0x10 [<ffffffff81042594>] process_one_work+0x174/0x450 [<ffffffff81042536>] ? process_one_work+0x116/0x450 [<ffffffff81042e13>] worker_thread+0x123/0x2d0 [<ffffffff81042cf0>] ? manage_workers.isra.28+0x120/0x120 [<ffffffff81047d8e>] kthread+0x8e/0xa0 [<ffffffff8136ba74>] kernel_thread_helper+0x4/0x10 [<ffffffff8136a199>] ? retint_restore_args+0xe/0xe [<ffffffff81047d00>] ? __init_kthread_worker+0x70/0x70 [<ffffffff8136ba70>] ? gs_change+0xb/0xb Code: be e2 00 00 00 48 c7 c7 d1 2a 4e 81 e8 bf fb fd ff 48 8b 5d f0 4c 8b 65 f8 c9 c3 0f 1f 44 00 00 48 8b 87 08 02 00 00 55 48 89 e5 <48> 8b 40 f8 5d c3 66 66 66 66 66 66 2e 0f 1f 84 00 00 00 00 00 RIP [<ffffffff8104801b>] kthread_data+0xb/0x20 RSP <ffff8800072c1888> CR2: fffffffffffffff8 ---[ end trace 996a332dc399111d ]--- Fixing recursive fault but reboot is needed!
Signed-off-by: Anton Vorontsov anton.vorontsov@linaro.org --- fs/pstore/platform.c | 5 +++-- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
diff --git a/fs/pstore/platform.c b/fs/pstore/platform.c index 4f49bb4..1dbf49d 100644 --- a/fs/pstore/platform.c +++ b/fs/pstore/platform.c @@ -41,10 +41,11 @@ * whether the system is actually still running well enough * to let someone see the entry */ -static int pstore_update_ms = 60000; +static int pstore_update_ms = -1; module_param_named(update_ms, pstore_update_ms, int, 0600); MODULE_PARM_DESC(update_ms, "milliseconds before pstore updates its content " - "(default is 60000; -1 means runtime updates are disabled)"); + "(default is -1, which means runtime updates are disabled; " + "enabling this option is not safe)");
static int pstore_new_entry;