alistair23-linux/Documentation/x86/x86_64
Josh Poimboeuf 0ee1dd9f5e x86/dumpstack: Remove raw stack dump
For mostly historical reasons, the x86 oops dump shows the raw stack
values:

  ...
  [registers]
  Stack:
   ffff880079af7350 ffff880079905400 0000000000000000 ffffc900008f3ae0
   ffffffffa0196610 0000000000000001 00010000ffffffff 0000000087654321
   0000000000000002 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000
  Call Trace:
  ...

This seems to be an artifact from long ago, and probably isn't needed
anymore.  It generally just adds noise to the dump, and it can be
actively harmful because it leaks kernel addresses.

Linus says:

  "The stack dump actually goes back to forever, and it used to be
   useful back in 1992 or so. But it used to be useful mainly because
   stacks were simpler and we didn't have very good call traces anyway. I
   definitely remember having used them - I just do not remember having
   used them in the last ten+ years.

   Of course, it's still true that if you can trigger an oops, you've
   likely already lost the security game, but since the stack dump is so
   useless, let's aim to just remove it and make games like the above
   harder."

This also removes the related 'kstack=' cmdline option and the
'kstack_depth_to_print' sysctl.

Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Cc: Brian Gerst <brgerst@gmail.com>
Cc: Denys Vlasenko <dvlasenk@redhat.com>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/e83bd50df52d8fe88e94d2566426ae40d813bf8f.1477405374.git.jpoimboe@redhat.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
2016-10-25 18:40:37 +02:00
..
00-INDEX x86: move x86-specific documentation into Documentation/x86 2008-05-30 17:19:03 -07:00
boot-options.txt x86/dumpstack: Remove raw stack dump 2016-10-25 18:40:37 +02:00
cpu-hotplug-spec x86: move x86-specific documentation into Documentation/x86 2008-05-30 17:19:03 -07:00
fake-numa-for-cpusets Documenation: update cgroup's document path 2016-08-03 15:43:58 -06:00
machinecheck x86/Documentation: Fix various typos in Documentation/x86/ files 2016-07-01 10:00:10 +02:00
mm.txt x86: fix memory ranges in mm documentation 2016-09-06 06:42:42 -06:00
uefi.txt x86 boot: only pick up additional EFI memmap if add_efi_memmap flag 2008-07-08 13:10:41 +02:00