audit: report audit wait metric in audit status reply

In environments where the preservation of audit events and predictable
usage of system memory are prioritized, admins may use a combination of
--backlog_wait_time and -b options at the risk of degraded performance
resulting from backlog waiting. In some cases, this risk may be
preferred to lost events or unbounded memory usage. Ideally, this risk
can be mitigated by making adjustments when backlog waiting is detected.

However, detection can be difficult using the currently available
metrics. For example, an admin attempting to debug degraded performance
may falsely believe a full backlog indicates backlog waiting. It may
turn out the backlog frequently fills up but drains quickly.

To make it easier to reliably track degraded performance to backlog
waiting, this patch makes the following changes:

Add a new field backlog_wait_time_total to the audit status reply.
Initialize this field to zero. Add to this field the total time spent
by the current task on scheduled timeouts while the backlog limit is
exceeded. Reset field to zero upon request via AUDIT_SET.

Tested on Ubuntu 18.04 using complementary changes to the
audit-userspace and audit-testsuite:
- https://github.com/linux-audit/audit-userspace/pull/134
- https://github.com/linux-audit/audit-testsuite/pull/97

Signed-off-by: Max Englander <max.englander@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul Moore <paul@paul-moore.com>

1 files changed, 25 insertions, 10 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/audit.c b/kernel/audit.c
index a2f3e34aa724..d72663ac248c 100644
--- a/kernel/audit.c
+++ b/kernel/audit.c
@@ -136,6 +136,11 @@ u32		audit_sig_sid = 0;
 */
 static atomic_t	audit_lost = ATOMIC_INIT(0);
 
+/* Monotonically increasing sum of time the kernel has spent
+ * waiting while the backlog limit is exceeded.
+ */
+static atomic_t audit_backlog_wait_time_actual = ATOMIC_INIT(0);
+
 /* Hash for inode-based rules */
 struct list_head audit_inode_hash[AUDIT_INODE_BUCKETS];
 
@@ -1201,17 +1206,18 @@ static int audit_receive_msg(struct sk_buff *skb, struct nlmsghdr *nlh)
 	case AUDIT_GET: {
 		struct audit_status	s;
 		memset(&s, 0, sizeof(s));
-		s.enabled		= audit_enabled;
-		s.failure		= audit_failure;
+		s.enabled		   = audit_enabled;
+		s.failure		   = audit_failure;
 		/* NOTE: use pid_vnr() so the PID is relative to the current
 		 *       namespace */
-		s.pid			= auditd_pid_vnr();
-		s.rate_limit		= audit_rate_limit;
-		s.backlog_limit		= audit_backlog_limit;
-		s.lost			= atomic_read(&audit_lost);
-		s.backlog		= skb_queue_len(&audit_queue);
-		s.feature_bitmap	= AUDIT_FEATURE_BITMAP_ALL;
-		s.backlog_wait_time	= audit_backlog_wait_time;
+		s.pid			   = auditd_pid_vnr();
+		s.rate_limit		   = audit_rate_limit;
+		s.backlog_limit		   = audit_backlog_limit;
+		s.lost			   = atomic_read(&audit_lost);
+		s.backlog		   = skb_queue_len(&audit_queue);
+		s.feature_bitmap	   = AUDIT_FEATURE_BITMAP_ALL;
+		s.backlog_wait_time	   = audit_backlog_wait_time;
+		s.backlog_wait_time_actual = atomic_read(&audit_backlog_wait_time_actual);
 		audit_send_reply(skb, seq, AUDIT_GET, 0, 0, &s, sizeof(s));
 		break;
 	}
@@ -1315,6 +1321,12 @@ static int audit_receive_msg(struct sk_buff *skb, struct nlmsghdr *nlh)
 			audit_log_config_change("lost", 0, lost, 1);
 			return lost;
 		}
+		if (s.mask == AUDIT_STATUS_BACKLOG_WAIT_TIME_ACTUAL) {
+			u32 actual = atomic_xchg(&audit_backlog_wait_time_actual, 0);
+
+			audit_log_config_change("backlog_wait_time_actual", 0, actual, 1);
+			return actual;
+		}
 		break;
 	}
 	case AUDIT_GET_FEATURE:
@@ -1826,12 +1838,15 @@ struct audit_buffer *audit_log_start(struct audit_context *ctx, gfp_t gfp_mask,
 			/* sleep if we are allowed and we haven't exhausted our
 			 * backlog wait limit */
 			if (gfpflags_allow_blocking(gfp_mask) && (stime > 0)) {
+				long rtime = stime;
+
 				DECLARE_WAITQUEUE(wait, current);
 
 				add_wait_queue_exclusive(&audit_backlog_wait,
 							 &wait);
 				set_current_state(TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE);
-				stime = schedule_timeout(stime);
+				stime = schedule_timeout(rtime);
+				atomic_add(rtime - stime, &audit_backlog_wait_time_actual);
 				remove_wait_queue(&audit_backlog_wait, &wait);
 			} else {
 				if (audit_rate_check() && printk_ratelimit())