Re: [PATCH] audit: do not panic kernel on invalid audit parameter

On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 04:45:26PM -0500, Paul Moore wrote: > On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 4:33 PM, Greg Edwards <gedwards(a)ddn.com&gt; wrote: >> If you pass in an invalid audit kernel boot parameter, e.g. 'audit=off', >> the kernel panics very early in boot with no output on the console >> indicating the problem. > > I'm guessing the problem is that there was too much info dumped to the > console and the error message was lost (there is one, to say there is > "no output" isn't completely correct), is that what happened? Or was > there honestly *no* output on the console? Booting a 4.16-rc2 VM with defconfig + kvmconfig with the 'audit=off' boot parameter (my mistake), the only output you get is: . Not terribly enlightening.

>> This seems overly harsh. Instead, print the error indicating an invalid >> audit parameter value and leave auditing disabled. > > There are some audit requirements which appear rather bizarre at > times, e.g. the need to panic the kernel instead of losing an audit > event. Steve is the one who follows most of these audit requirements > so I'm going to wait until he has a chance to look at this. > > There is also another issue in this patch, on error you have the audit > subsystem default to off, we may want to change this to default to on > in case of error (fail safely). Sure, that is fine. I just took a stab at what to do for the error case. I'm happy to default it to enabled, if that would be more appropriate. Greg