kprobes on by default in 2.6.20.1 kernel.org kernels

[Keshavamurthy, Anil S]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 04:24:14PM -0700, Nathan DeBardeleben wrote:
> I just wanted to probe (har har) to see if you guys knew why kprobes is 
> set to "Y" (in the kernel) by default on the latest 2.6.20.1 kernel I 
> got from kernel.org.  I don't consider this a great move and am a little 
> worried about it.  For one thing, I know now we'll actively make certain 
> it's off in all future kernels we build that are intended for production 
> machines.

Can you please explain your cause for worry in detail. In what way it 
is causing problems. Hopefully we can address your concerns.

> 
> I grabbed the latest kernel to do some kprobes testing, went to 
> configure it to turn probing on and was very surprised to find it on by 
> default.
As a matter of fact, KPROBE is enabled by several major OSD like
Red Hat and SuSE on their enterprise versions and are in
the market since begining/middle of last year.

> 
> What's the process that the kernel maintainers go through to determine 
> which options are on by default anyway?

AFAIK, their is no formal process(depends on developer community). 
And if you are building a kernel for production machine then I assume 
you just don;t depend on default config which can turn on lots of stuff 
intended for testing and experimental purposes.

-Anil Keshavamurthy