linux/Documentation/sysctl
Kees Cook bc4f2f5469 taint: add taint for randstruct
Since the randstruct plugin can intentionally produce extremely unusual
kernel structure layouts (even performance pathological ones), some
maintainers want to be able to trivially determine if an Oops is coming
from a randstruct-built kernel, so as to keep their sanity when
debugging.  This adds the new flag and initializes taint_mask
immediately when built with randstruct.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1519084390-43867-4-git-send-email-keescook@chromium.org
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Reviewed-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2018-04-11 10:28:35 -07:00
..
00-INDEX
README docs: Update binfmt_misc links 2017-10-03 15:23:38 -06:00
abi.txt
fs.txt docs: Update binfmt_misc links 2017-10-03 15:23:38 -06:00
kernel.txt taint: add taint for randstruct 2018-04-11 10:28:35 -07:00
net.txt net: do not create fallback tunnels for non-default namespaces 2018-03-09 11:23:11 -05:00
sunrpc.txt
user.txt Documentation/sysctl/user.txt: fix typo 2018-02-06 18:32:48 -08:00
vm.txt mm/page_alloc: don't reserve ZONE_HIGHMEM for ZONE_MOVABLE request 2018-04-11 10:28:32 -07:00

README

Documentation for /proc/sys/		kernel version 2.2.10
	(c) 1998, 1999,  Rik van Riel <riel@nl.linux.org>

'Why', I hear you ask, 'would anyone even _want_ documentation
for them sysctl files? If anybody really needs it, it's all in
the source...'

Well, this documentation is written because some people either
don't know they need to tweak something, or because they don't
have the time or knowledge to read the source code.

Furthermore, the programmers who built sysctl have built it to
be actually used, not just for the fun of programming it :-)

==============================================================

Legal blurb:

As usual, there are two main things to consider:
1. you get what you pay for
2. it's free

The consequences are that I won't guarantee the correctness of
this document, and if you come to me complaining about how you
screwed up your system because of wrong documentation, I won't
feel sorry for you. I might even laugh at you...

But of course, if you _do_ manage to screw up your system using
only the sysctl options used in this file, I'd like to hear of
it. Not only to have a great laugh, but also to make sure that
you're the last RTFMing person to screw up.

In short, e-mail your suggestions, corrections and / or horror
stories to: <riel@nl.linux.org>

Rik van Riel.

==============================================================

Introduction:

Sysctl is a means of configuring certain aspects of the kernel
at run-time, and the /proc/sys/ directory is there so that you
don't even need special tools to do it!
In fact, there are only four things needed to use these config
facilities:
- a running Linux system
- root access
- common sense (this is especially hard to come by these days)
- knowledge of what all those values mean

As a quick 'ls /proc/sys' will show, the directory consists of
several (arch-dependent?) subdirs. Each subdir is mainly about
one part of the kernel, so you can do configuration on a piece
by piece basis, or just some 'thematic frobbing'.

The subdirs are about:
abi/		execution domains & personalities
debug/		<empty>
dev/		device specific information (eg dev/cdrom/info)
fs/		specific filesystems
		filehandle, inode, dentry and quota tuning
		binfmt_misc <Documentation/admin-guide/binfmt-misc.rst>
kernel/		global kernel info / tuning
		miscellaneous stuff
net/		networking stuff, for documentation look in:
		<Documentation/networking/>
proc/		<empty>
sunrpc/		SUN Remote Procedure Call (NFS)
vm/		memory management tuning
		buffer and cache management
user/		Per user per user namespace limits

These are the subdirs I have on my system. There might be more
or other subdirs in another setup. If you see another dir, I'd
really like to hear about it :-)