[PATCH 0/3] tracing/user_events: Allow events to persist for perfmon_capable users

[Beau Belgrave]

There are several scenarios that have come up where having a user_event
persist even if the process that registered it exits. The main one is
having a daemon create events on bootup that shouldn't get deleted if
the daemon has to exit or reload. Another is within OpenTelemetry
exporters, they wish to potentially check if a user_event exists on the
system to determine if exporting the data out should occur. The
user_event in this case must exist even in the absence of the owning
process running (such as the above daemon case).

Since persistent events aren't automatically cleaned up, we want to ensure
only trusted users are allowed to do this. It seems reasonable to use
CAP_PERFMON as that boundary, since those users can already do many things
via perf_event_open without requiring full CAP_SYS_ADMIN.

This patchset brings back the ability to use /sys/kernel/tracing/dynamic_events
to create user_events, as persist is now back to being supported. Both the
register and delete of events that persist require CAP_PERFMON, which prevents
a non-perfmon user from making an event go away that a perfmon user decided
should persist.

Beau Belgrave (3):
  tracing/user_events: Allow events to persist for perfmon_capable users
  selftests/user_events: Test persist flag cases
  tracing/user_events: Document persist event flags

 Documentation/trace/user_events.rst           | 21 ++++++-
 include/uapi/linux/user_events.h              | 11 +++-
 kernel/trace/trace_events_user.c              | 28 +++++-----
 .../testing/selftests/user_events/abi_test.c  | 55 ++++++++++++++++++-
 .../testing/selftests/user_events/dyn_test.c  | 54 +++++++++++++++++-
 5 files changed, 149 insertions(+), 20 deletions(-)


base-commit: f940e482b0f889e697372a22b6c15da87aa1f63a
-- 
2.34.1