c9e0924e5c
Open access to monitoring via kprobes and uprobes and eBPF tracing for CAP_PERFMON privileged process. Providing the access under CAP_PERFMON capability singly, without the rest of CAP_SYS_ADMIN credentials, excludes chances to misuse the credentials and makes operation more secure. perf kprobes and uprobes are used by ftrace and eBPF. perf probe uses ftrace to define new kprobe events, and those events are treated as tracepoint events. eBPF defines new probes via perf_event_open interface and then the probes are used in eBPF tracing. CAP_PERFMON implements the principle of least privilege for performance monitoring and observability operations (POSIX IEEE 1003.1e 2.2.2.39 principle of least privilege: A security design principle that states that a process or program be granted only those privileges (e.g., capabilities) necessary to accomplish its legitimate function, and only for the time that such privileges are actually required) For backward compatibility reasons access to perf_events subsystem remains open for CAP_SYS_ADMIN privileged processes but CAP_SYS_ADMIN usage for secure perf_events monitoring is discouraged with respect to CAP_PERFMON capability. Signed-off-by: Alexey Budankov <alexey.budankov@linux.intel.com> Reviewed-by: James Morris <jamorris@linux.microsoft.com> Tested-by: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com> Cc: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org> Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com> Cc: Igor Lubashev <ilubashe@akamai.com> Cc: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@redhat.com> Cc: Namhyung Kim <namhyung@kernel.org> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> Cc: Serge Hallyn <serge@hallyn.com> Cc: Song Liu <songliubraving@fb.com> Cc: Stephane Eranian <eranian@google.com> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Cc: intel-gfx@lists.freedesktop.org Cc: linux-doc@vger.kernel.org Cc: linux-security-module@vger.kernel.org Cc: selinux@vger.kernel.org Cc: linux-man@vger.kernel.org Link: http://lore.kernel.org/lkml/3c129d9a-ba8a-3483-ecc5-ad6c8e7c203f@linux.intel.com Signed-off-by: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.