Currently the database for file backend of selabel stores the file
context specifications in a single long array. This array is sorted by
special precedence rules, e.g. regular expressions without meta
character first, ordered by length, and the remaining regular
expressions ordered by stem (the prefix part of the regular expressions
without meta characters) length.
This results in suboptimal lookup performance for two reasons;
File context specifications without any meta characters (e.g.
'/etc/passwd') are still matched via an expensive regular expression
match operation.
All such trivial regular expressions are matched against before any non-
trivial regular expression, resulting in thousands of regex match
operations for lookups for paths not matching any of the trivial ones.
Rework the internal representation of the database in two ways:
Convert regular expressions without any meta characters and containing
only supported escaped characters (e.g. '/etc/rc\.d/init\.d') into
literal strings, which get compared via strcmp(3) later on.
Store the specifications in a tree structure (since the filesystem is a
tree) to reduce the to number of specifications that need to be checked.
Since the internal representation is completely rewritten introduce a
new compiled file context file format mirroring the tree structure.
The new format also stores all multi-byte data in network byte-order, so
that such compiled files can be cross-compiled, e.g. for embedded
devices with read-only filesystems (except for the regular expressions,
which are still architecture-dependent).
The improved lookup performance will also benefit SELinux aware daemons,
which create files with their default context, e.g. systemd.
# Performance data
## Compiled file context sizes
Fedora 38 (regular expressions are omitted on Fedora):
file_contexts.bin: 596783 -> 575284 (bytes)
file_contexts.homedirs.bin: 21219 -> 18185 (bytes)
Debian Sid (regular expressions are included):
file_contexts.bin: 2580704 -> 1428354 (bytes)
file_contexts.homedirs.bin: 130946 -> 96884 (bytes)
## Single lookup
(selabel -b file -k /bin/bash)
Fedora 38 in VM:
text: time: 3.6 ms -> 4.7 ms
peak heap: 2.32M -> 1.44M
peak rss: 5.61M -> 6.03M
compiled: time: 1.5 ms -> 1.5 ms
peak heap: 2.14M -> 917.93K
peak rss: 5.33M -> 5.47M
Debian Sid on Raspberry Pi 3:
text: time: 33.9 ms -> 19.9 ms
peak heap: 10.46M -> 468.72K
peak rss: 9.44M -> 4.98M
compiled: time: 39.3 ms -> 22.8 ms
peak heap: 13.09M -> 1.86M
peak rss: 12.57M -> 7.86M
## Full filesystem relabel
(restorecon -vRn /)
Fedora 38 in VM:
27.445 s -> 3.293 s
Debian Sid on Raspberry Pi 3:
86.734 s -> 10.810 s
(restorecon -vRn -T0 /)
Fedora 38 in VM (8 cores):
29.205 s -> 2.521 s
Debian Sid on Raspberry Pi 3 (4 cores):
46.974 s -> 10.728 s
(note: I am unsure why the parallel runs on Fedora are slower)
# TODO
There might be subtle differences in lookup results which evaded my
testing, because some precedence rules are oblique. For example
`/usr/(.*/)?lib(/.*)?` has to have a higher precedence than
`/usr/(.*/)?bin(/.*)?` to match the current Fedora behavior. Please
report any behavior changes.
If any code section is unclear I am happy to add some inline comments.
The maximum node depth in the database is set to 3, which seems to give
the best performance to memory usage ratio. Might be tweaked for
systems with different filesystem hierarchies (Android?).
I am not that familiar with the selabel_partial_match(3),
selabel_get_digests_all_partial_matches(3) and
selabel_hash_all_partial_matches(3) related interfaces, so I only did
some rudimentary tests for them.
# Patches
Patches 1-4 have been proposed already:
https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/selinux/list/?series=772728
Patch 5 has been proposed already:
https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/selinux/patch/20230803162301.302579-1-cgzones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
Patches 6-22 are cleanup and misc fixes which can be applied own their own.
Patch 23 is the rework
Patch 24 is removing unused code after the rework in patch 23
This patchset is also available at https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/pull/406
Christian Göttsche (24):
libselinux/utils: update selabel_partial_match
libselinux: misc label cleanup
libselinux: drop obsolete optimization flag
libselinux: drop unnecessary warning overrides
setfiles: do not issue AUDIT_FS_RELABEL on dry run
libselinux: cast to unsigned char for character handling function
libselinux: constify selabel_cmp(3) parameters
libselinux: introduce reallocarray(3)
libselinux: simplify zeroing allocation
libselinux: introduce selabel_nuke
libselinux/utils: use type safe union assignment
libselinux: avoid regex serialization truncations
libselinux/utils: introduce selabel_compare
libselinux: parameter simplifications
libselinux/utils: use correct type for backend argument
libselinux: update string_to_mode()
libselinux: remove SELABEL_OPT_SUBSET support from selabel_file(5)
libselinux: fix logic for building android backend
libselinux: avoid unused function
libselinux: check for stream rewind failures
libselinux: simplify internal selabel_validate prototype
libselinux/utils: drop include of internal header file
libselinux: rework selabel_file(5) database
libselinux: remove unused hashtab code
libselinux/include/selinux/label.h | 6 +-
libselinux/include/selinux/selinux.h | 6 +-
libselinux/src/Makefile | 20 +-
libselinux/src/booleans.c | 8 +-
libselinux/src/compute_create.c | 2 +-
libselinux/src/get_context_list.c | 14 +-
libselinux/src/get_default_type.c | 2 +-
libselinux/src/hashtab.c | 234 --
libselinux/src/hashtab.h | 117 -
libselinux/src/is_customizable_type.c | 7 +-
libselinux/src/label.c | 40 +-
libselinux/src/label_backends_android.c | 9 +-
libselinux/src/label_file.c | 2107 +++++++++++------
libselinux/src/label_file.h | 893 ++++---
libselinux/src/label_internal.h | 17 +-
libselinux/src/label_media.c | 7 +-
libselinux/src/label_support.c | 43 +-
libselinux/src/label_x.c | 7 +-
libselinux/src/load_policy.c | 2 +-
libselinux/src/matchmediacon.c | 6 +-
libselinux/src/matchpathcon.c | 17 +-
libselinux/src/regex.c | 57 +-
.../src/selinux_check_securetty_context.c | 4 +-
libselinux/src/selinux_config.c | 12 +-
libselinux/src/selinux_internal.c | 16 +
libselinux/src/selinux_internal.h | 4 +
libselinux/src/selinux_restorecon.c | 3 +-
libselinux/src/seusers.c | 6 +-
libselinux/utils/.gitignore | 2 +
libselinux/utils/matchpathcon.c | 11 +-
libselinux/utils/sefcontext_compile.c | 536 +++--
libselinux/utils/selabel_compare.c | 119 +
libselinux/utils/selabel_digest.c | 3 +-
.../selabel_get_digests_all_partial_matches.c | 2 -
libselinux/utils/selabel_lookup.c | 3 +-
libselinux/utils/selabel_nuke.c | 134 ++
libselinux/utils/selabel_partial_match.c | 7 +-
libselinux/utils/selinux_check_access.c | 2 +-
policycoreutils/setfiles/setfiles.c | 16 +-
39 files changed, 2854 insertions(+), 1647 deletions(-)
delete mode 100644 libselinux/src/hashtab.c
delete mode 100644 libselinux/src/hashtab.h
create mode 100644 libselinux/utils/selabel_compare.c
create mode 100644 libselinux/utils/selabel_nuke.c
--
2.40.1
