Ensure we are running under root #1992
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This was previously discussed in #719. While ideally we could check for the individual capabilities this is fraught with issues: different kernel revisions might require different capabilities, over time we are adding new features that might require or drop the needed capabilities, and in general, capabilities don't seem to be a feature that many users are intimately familiar with. Checking for the superuser is a reasonable thing to do as it will ensure we can run, and it's how every single deployment that we know of executes this software. We can always re-evaluate this in the future, but in the meantime let's ensure that running the Agent does not result in surprises (#1979, but we've seen this happening multiple times). As there were concerns regarding this check being to broad, I've added a escape hatch, which is disabled by default (`--allow-running-as-non-root`). Test Plan ======== **no root w/ escape hatch** ``` $ dist/parca-agent --allow-running-as-non-root level=error name=parca-agent ts=2023-09-07T08:39:27.529651017Z caller=main.go:345 err="bpf check: perf event program type not supported: errno 0\nstack trace map type not supported: errno 0\nhash map type not supported: errno 0" ``` **no root** ``` $ dist/parca-agent level=error name=parca-agent ts=2023-09-07T08:39:34.003842932Z caller=main.go:345 err="superuser (root) is required to run Parca Agent to load and manipulate BPF programs" ``` **root** ``` $ sudo dist/parca-agent ``` It works fine
Sylfrena
approved these changes
Sep 7, 2023
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This was previously discussed in
#719.
While ideally we could check for the individual capabilities this is fraught with issues: different kernel revisions might require different capabilities, over time we are adding new features that might require or drop the needed capabilities, and in general, capabilities don't seem to be a feature that many users are intimately familiar with.
Checking for the superuser is a reasonable thing to do as it will ensure we can run, and it's how every single deployment that we know of executes this software.
We can always re-evaluate this in the future, but in the meantime let's ensure that running the Agent does not result in surprises (#1979, but we've seen this happening multiple times).
As there were concerns regarding this check being to broad, I've added a escape hatch, which is disabled by default
(
--allow-running-as-non-root).Test Plan
no root w/ escape hatch
no root
root
It works fine