Re: Unable to change the content of memory using crash on a live system

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



Dheeraj Sangamkar wrote:
I use crash 4.0-3.9 on a live 2.6.9-55 kernel on i386/i686 as root.

crash> ls -l /dev/crash
crw-------  1 root root 10, 61 Mar  5 21:57 /dev/crash
crash> ls -l /dev/mem
crw-r-----  1 root kmem 1, 1 Mar  5 16:49 /dev/mem
crash> q
[root@linux17081 ~]# ls -l /dev/crash /dev/mem
ls: /dev/crash: No such file or directory
crw-r-----  1 root kmem 1, 1 Mar  5 16:49 /dev/mem
[root@linux17081 ~]# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root),1(bin),2(daemon),3(sys),4(adm),6(disk),10(wheel)

So, the /dev/crash file has write permission for me. The

I am attempting to change the content of some memory.

crash> struct request_queue 0xf7b933f8
struct request_queue {
  queue_head = {
<SNIP>
...
}

crash> struct -o request_queue | grep in_flight
  [476] unsigned int in_flight;
crash> eval 0xf7b933f8 + 476
hexadecimal: f7b935d4
    decimal: 4156110292  (-138857004)
      octal: 36756232724
     binary: 11110111101110010011010111010100
crash> rd f7b935d4
f7b935d4:  fffffff1                              ....
crash> wr f7b935d4 0
wr: cannot write to /dev/crash!

I get the error above even if I change the ownership of /dev/kmem to root:root
crash> ls -l /dev/mem
crw-r-----  1 root root 1, 1 Mar  5 16:49 /dev/mem

Am I doing something wrong? How do I change the content of memory on a live system using crash?

With Red Hat x86 and x86_64 kernels, you can't.

I feel your pain...

The crash utility traditionally has had the capability of writing
to /dev/mem, which can be a very useful, powerful (and dangerous)
tool for kernel debugging.

But Red Hat deemed the /dev/mem interface as a security hole,
and restricted the x86 and x86_64 /dev/mem drivers to just
the first 256 pages (1MB) of physical memory, making it useless
for the crash utility.  They allowed me to create the /dev/crash
driver to replace it -- but it is effectively read-only because
the driver has no write file operations handler:

  static struct file_operations crash_fops = {
          owner:          THIS_MODULE,
          llseek:         crash_llseek,
          read:           crash_read,
  };

and so the kernel's vfs_write() returns EINVAL.

Changing the permission of /dev/mem won't help because it
isn't used by the crash utility when /dev/crash exists.

Sorry about that,
  Dave


--
Crash-utility mailing list
Crash-utility@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/crash-utility

[Index of Archives]     [Fedora Development]     [Fedora Desktop]     [Fedora SELinux]     [Yosemite News]     [KDE Users]     [Fedora Tools]

 

Powered by Linux