From 46329a9dd74bd12e92fb7cc8afe70dad32875758 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jeff Layton Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2026 09:38:22 -0500 Subject: [PATCH] acct(2): begin the deprecation of legacy BSD process accounting As Christian points out [1], even though it's privileged, this interface has a lot of footguns. There are better options these days (e.g. eBPF), so it would be good to start discouraging its use and mark it as deprecated. [1]: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/20250212-giert-spannend-8893f1eaba7d@brauner/ Signed-off-by: Jeff Layton Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260106-bsd-acct-v1-1-d15564b52c83@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner --- init/Kconfig | 7 +++++-- 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/init/Kconfig b/init/Kconfig index fa79feb8fe57b..160c1c4ef2535 100644 --- a/init/Kconfig +++ b/init/Kconfig @@ -624,8 +624,9 @@ config SCHED_HW_PRESSURE arch_update_hw_pressure() and arch_scale_thermal_pressure(). config BSD_PROCESS_ACCT - bool "BSD Process Accounting" + bool "BSD Process Accounting (DEPRECATED)" depends on MULTIUSER + default n help If you say Y here, a user level program will be able to instruct the kernel (via a special system call) to write process accounting @@ -635,7 +636,9 @@ config BSD_PROCESS_ACCT command name, memory usage, controlling terminal etc. (the complete list is in the struct acct in ). It is up to the user level program to do useful things with this - information. This is generally a good idea, so say Y. + information. This mechanism is antiquated and has significant + scalability issues. You probably want to use eBPF instead. Say + N unless you really need this. config BSD_PROCESS_ACCT_V3 bool "BSD Process Accounting version 3 file format" -- 2.47.3