kmsg_dump: don't run on non-error paths by default

Since commit 04c6862c055f ("kmsg_dump: add kmsg_dump() calls to the
reboot, halt, poweroff and emergency_restart paths"), kmsg_dump() gets
run on normal paths including poweroff and reboot.

This is less than ideal given pstore implementations that can only
represent single backtraces, since a reboot may overwrite a stored oops
before it's been picked up by userspace.  In addition, some pstore
backends may have low performance and provide a significant delay in
reboot as a result.

This patch adds a printk.always_kmsg_dump kernel parameter (which can also
be changed from userspace).  Without it, the code will only be run on
failure paths rather than on normal paths.  The option can be enabled in
environments where there's a desire to attempt to audit whether or not a
reboot was cleanly requested or not.

Signed-off-by: Matthew Garrett <mjg@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Seiji Aguchi <seiji.aguchi@hds.com>
Cc: Seiji Aguchi <seiji.aguchi@hds.com>
Cc: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
Cc: Marco Stornelli <marco.stornelli@gmail.com>
Cc: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com>
Cc: Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt b/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
index 033d4e69b43b..d99fd9c0ec0e 100644
--- a/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
+++ b/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
@@ -2211,6 +2211,12 @@ bytes respectively. Such letter suffixes can also be entirely omitted.
 
                         default: off.
 
+        printk.always_kmsg_dump=
+                        Trigger kmsg_dump for cases other than kernel oops or
+                        panics
+                        Format: <bool>  (1/Y/y=enable, 0/N/n=disable)
+                        default: disabled
+
         printk.time=    Show timing data prefixed to each printk message line
                         Format: <bool>  (1/Y/y=enable, 0/N/n=disable)