x86: introduce /dev/mem restrictions with a config option

This patch introduces a restriction on /dev/mem: Only non-memory can be
read or written unless the newly introduced config option is set.

The X server needs access to /dev/mem for the PCI space, but it doesn't need
access to memory; both the file permissions and SELinux permissions of /dev/mem
just make X effectively super-super powerful. With the exception of the
BIOS area, there's just no valid app that uses /dev/mem on actual memory.
Other popular users of /dev/mem are rootkits and the like.
(note: mmap access of memory via /dev/mem was already not allowed since
a really long time)

People who want to use /dev/mem for kernel debugging can enable the config
option.

The restrictions of this patch have been in the Fedora and RHEL kernels for
at least 4 years without any problems.

Signed-off-by: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>

1 files changed, 19 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/arch/x86/mm/init_32.c b/arch/x86/mm/init_32.c
index 9ec62da85fd..39852d53901 100644
--- a/arch/x86/mm/init_32.c
+++ b/arch/x86/mm/init_32.c
@@ -227,6 +227,25 @@ static inline int page_kills_ppro(unsigned long pagenr)
 	return 0;
 }
 
+/*
+ * devmem_is_allowed() checks to see if /dev/mem access to a certain address
+ * is valid. The argument is a physical page number.
+ *
+ *
+ * On x86, access has to be given to the first megabyte of ram because that area
+ * contains bios code and data regions used by X and dosemu and similar apps.
+ * Access has to be given to non-kernel-ram areas as well, these contain the PCI
+ * mmio resources as well as potential bios/acpi data regions.
+ */
+int devmem_is_allowed(unsigned long pagenr)
+{
+	if (pagenr <= 256)
+		return 1;
+	if (!page_is_ram(pagenr))
+		return 1;
+	return 0;
+}
+
 #ifdef CONFIG_HIGHMEM
 pte_t *kmap_pte;
 pgprot_t kmap_prot;