kernel/sysctl: support setting sysctl parameters from kernel command line

Patch series "support setting sysctl parameters from kernel command line", v3.

This series adds support for something that seems like many people
always wanted but nobody added it yet, so here's the ability to set
sysctl parameters via kernel command line options in the form of
sysctl.vm.something=1

The important part is Patch 1.  The second, not so important part is an
attempt to clean up legacy one-off parameters that do the same thing as
a sysctl.  I don't want to remove them completely for compatibility
reasons, but with generic sysctl support the idea is to remove the
one-off param handlers and treat the parameters as aliases for the
sysctl variants.

I have identified several parameters that mention sysctl counterparts in
Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt but there might be more.
The conversion also has varying level of success:

 - numa_zonelist_order is converted in Patch 2 together with adding the
   necessary infrastructure. It's easy as it doesn't really do anything
   but warn on deprecated value these days.

 - hung_task_panic is converted in Patch 3, but there's a downside that
   now it only accepts 0 and 1, while previously it was any integer
   value

 - nmi_watchdog maps to two sysctls nmi_watchdog and hardlockup_panic,
   so there's no straighforward conversion possible

 - traceoff_on_warning is a flag without value and it would be required
   to handle that somehow in the conversion infractructure, which seems
   pointless for a single flag

This patch (of 5):

A recently proposed patch to add vm_swappiness command line parameter in
addition to existing sysctl [1] made me wonder why we don't have a
general support for passing sysctl parameters via command line.

Googling found only somebody else wondering the same [2], but I haven't
found any prior discussion with reasons why not to do this.

Settings the vm_swappiness issue aside (the underlying issue might be
solved in a different way), quick search of kernel-parameters.txt shows
there are already some that exist as both sysctl and kernel parameter -
hung_task_panic, nmi_watchdog, numa_zonelist_order, traceoff_on_warning.

A general mechanism would remove the need to add more of those one-offs
and might be handy in situations where configuration by e.g.
/etc/sysctl.d/ is impractical.

Hence, this patch adds a new parse_args() pass that looks for parameters
prefixed by 'sysctl.' and tries to interpret them as writes to the
corresponding sys/ files using an temporary in-kernel procfs mount.
This mechanism was suggested by Eric W.  Biederman [3], as it handles
all dynamically registered sysctl tables, even though we don't handle
modular sysctls.  Errors due to e.g.  invalid parameter name or value
are reported in the kernel log.

The processing is hooked right before the init process is loaded, as
some handlers might be more complicated than simple setters and might
need some subsystems to be initialized.  At the moment the init process
can be started and eventually execute a process writing to /proc/sys/
then it should be also fine to do that from the kernel.

Sysctls registered later on module load time are not set by this
mechanism - it's expected that in such scenarios, setting sysctl values
from userspace is practical enough.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/r/BL0PR02MB560167492CA4094C91589930E9FC0@BL0PR02MB5601.namprd02.prod.outlook.com/
[2] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/558802/how-to-set-sysctl-using-kernel-command-line-parameter
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/r/87bloj2skm.fsf@x220.int.ebiederm.org/

Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Iurii Zaikin <yzaikin@google.com>
Cc: Ivan Teterevkov <ivan.teterevkov@nutanix.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
Cc: "Eric W . Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: "Guilherme G . Piccoli" <gpiccoli@canonical.com>
Cc: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200427180433.7029-1-vbabka@suse.cz
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200427180433.7029-2-vbabka@suse.cz
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
index df9b0fe2ed60..d02b9d023660 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
@@ -4969,6 +4969,15 @@
 
 	switches=	[HW,M68k]
 
+	sysctl.*=	[KNL]
+			Set a sysctl parameter, right before loading the init
+			process, as if the value was written to the respective
+			/proc/sys/... file. Both '.' and '/' are recognized as
+			separators. Unrecognized parameters and invalid values
+			are reported in the kernel log. Sysctls registered
+			later by a loaded module cannot be set this way.
+			Example: sysctl.vm.swappiness=40
+
 	sysfs.deprecated=0|1 [KNL]
 			Enable/disable old style sysfs layout for old udev
 			on older distributions. When this option is enabled