On Fri 23-06-17 12:20:25, Kees Cook wrote: > On Fri, Jun 23, 2017 at 7:06 AM, Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Tue 20-06-17 16:09:11, Kees Cook wrote: > >> Some hardened environments want to build kernels with slab_nomerge > >> already set (so that they do not depend on remembering to set the kernel > >> command line option). This is desired to reduce the risk of kernel heap > >> overflows being able to overwrite objects from merged caches and changes > >> the requirements for cache layout control, increasing the difficulty of > >> these attacks. By keeping caches unmerged, these kinds of exploits can > >> usually only damage objects in the same cache (though the risk to metadata > >> exploitation is unchanged). > > > > Do we really want to have a dedicated config for each hardening specific > > kernel command line? I believe we have quite a lot of config options > > already. Can we rather have a CONFIG_HARDENED_CMD_OPIONS and cover all > > those defauls there instead? > > There's not been a lot of success with grouped Kconfigs in the past > (e.g. CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL), but one thing that has been suggested is a > defconfig-like make target that would collect all the things together. Which wouldn't reduce the number of config options, would it? I don't know but is there any usecase when somebody wants to have hardened kernel and still want to have different defaults than you are suggesting? -- Michal Hocko SUSE Labs -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx"> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>