Comment by akikoo

Comment by akikoo a day ago

2 replies

Here's when:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuStudio/RealTimeKerne...

> Security Implications

> All it would take is one malicious process to execute and take advantage of the real-time code to completely lock-out a user from their machine, turning that machine into part of a botnet or other malicious purpose. Real-Time processes have the potential to completely take-over a machine. This is the number one reason Ubuntu does not carry a Real-Time kernel.

Snild 13 hours ago

That page seems to be describing SCHED_FIFO processes, which are already a thing without PREEMPT_RT. Maybe they weren't back in the pre-2.6 days? Anyway, they are usually limited to 95% of total runtime by the sched_rt_runtime_us tunable, to avoid accidental self-DoSing. Maybe that, too, was later invention -- 2.6 is very very old.

The page goes on:

> A patch does exist to enable process to have real-time process access to any process requesting it.

According to the sched(7) man page, this has never been the case: before 2.6.12, the process had to have CAP_SYS_NICE; after, it was limited by policy through RLIMIT_RTPRIO. I guess it's possible that this was not the case for the original out-of-tree patch set.

But it's been there for many years, well before the 2020 edit that added the bulk of the current text on that wiki page.

PhilipRoman 19 hours ago

>completely lock-out a user from their machine, turning that machine into part of a botnet or other malicious purpose

There seems to be a pretty big leap from beginning of that sentence to the end, I personally wouldn't consider local DoS a problem.