WSL2-Linux-Kernel/Documentation/sysctl
Eric W. Biederman d29216842a mnt: Add a per mount namespace limit on the number of mounts
CAI Qian <caiqian@redhat.com> pointed out that the semantics
of shared subtrees make it possible to create an exponentially
increasing number of mounts in a mount namespace.

    mkdir /tmp/1 /tmp/2
    mount --make-rshared /
    for i in $(seq 1 20) ; do mount --bind /tmp/1 /tmp/2 ; done

Will create create 2^20 or 1048576 mounts, which is a practical problem
as some people have managed to hit this by accident.

As such CVE-2016-6213 was assigned.

Ian Kent <raven@themaw.net> described the situation for autofs users
as follows:

> The number of mounts for direct mount maps is usually not very large because of
> the way they are implemented, large direct mount maps can have performance
> problems. There can be anywhere from a few (likely case a few hundred) to less
> than 10000, plus mounts that have been triggered and not yet expired.
>
> Indirect mounts have one autofs mount at the root plus the number of mounts that
> have been triggered and not yet expired.
>
> The number of autofs indirect map entries can range from a few to the common
> case of several thousand and in rare cases up to between 30000 and 50000. I've
> not heard of people with maps larger than 50000 entries.
>
> The larger the number of map entries the greater the possibility for a large
> number of active mounts so it's not hard to expect cases of a 1000 or somewhat
> more active mounts.

So I am setting the default number of mounts allowed per mount
namespace at 100,000.  This is more than enough for any use case I
know of, but small enough to quickly stop an exponential increase
in mounts.  Which should be perfect to catch misconfigurations and
malfunctioning programs.

For anyone who needs a higher limit this can be changed by writing
to the new /proc/sys/fs/mount-max sysctl.

Tested-by: CAI Qian <caiqian@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
2016-09-30 12:46:48 -05:00
..
00-INDEX sysctl: remove obsolete comments 2011-01-13 08:03:18 -08:00
README userns; Document per user per user namespace limits. 2016-09-22 12:52:03 -05:00
abi.txt Linux-2.6.12-rc2 2005-04-16 15:20:36 -07:00
fs.txt mnt: Add a per mount namespace limit on the number of mounts 2016-09-30 12:46:48 -05:00
kernel.txt printk: add kernel parameter to control writes to /dev/kmsg 2016-08-02 19:35:06 -04:00
net.txt bpf: add generic constant blinding for use in jits 2016-05-16 13:49:32 -04:00
sunrpc.txt Linux-2.6.12-rc2 2005-04-16 15:20:36 -07:00
user.txt userns; Document per user per user namespace limits. 2016-09-22 12:52:03 -05:00
vm.txt Documentation: add watermark_scale_factor to the list of vm systcl file 2016-07-18 08:27:01 -06:00

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/binfmt_misc.txt>
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 :-)