mm/init: Add 'rodata=off' boot cmdline parameter to disable read-only kernel mappings

It may be useful to debug writes to the readonly sections of memory,
so provide a cmdline "rodata=off" to allow for this. This can be
expanded in the future to support "log" and "write" modes, but that
will need to be architecture-specific.

This also makes KDB software breakpoints more usable, as read-only
mappings can now be disabled on any kernel.

Suggested-by: H. Peter Anvin <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <[email protected]>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <[email protected]>
Cc: Brian Gerst <[email protected]>
Cc: David Brown <[email protected]>
Cc: Denys Vlasenko <[email protected]>
Cc: Emese Revfy <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Mathias Krause <[email protected]>
Cc: Michael Ellerman <[email protected]>
Cc: PaX Team <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Cc: linux-arch <[email protected]>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <[email protected]>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/debug/kdb/kdb_bp.c b/kernel/debug/kdb/kdb_bp.c
index e1dbf4a2c69e..90ff129c88a2 100644
--- a/kernel/debug/kdb/kdb_bp.c
+++ b/kernel/debug/kdb/kdb_bp.c
@@ -153,13 +153,11 @@ static int _kdb_bp_install(struct pt_regs *regs, kdb_bp_t *bp)
 	} else {
 		kdb_printf("%s: failed to set breakpoint at 0x%lx\n",
 			   __func__, bp->bp_addr);
-#ifdef CONFIG_DEBUG_RODATA
 		if (!bp->bp_type) {
 			kdb_printf("Software breakpoints are unavailable.\n"
-				   "  Change the kernel CONFIG_DEBUG_RODATA=n\n"
+				   "  Boot the kernel with rodata=off\n"
 				   "  OR use hw breaks: help bph\n");
 		}
-#endif
 		return 1;
 	}
 	return 0;