• Stephen Smalley's avatar
    selinux: refactor changing booleans · c7c556f1
    Stephen Smalley authored
    Refactor the logic for changing SELinux policy booleans in a similar
    manner to the refactoring of policy load, thereby reducing the
    size of the critical section when the policy write-lock is held
    and making it easier to convert the policy rwlock to RCU in the
    future.  Instead of directly modifying the policydb in place, modify
    a copy and then swap it into place through a single pointer update.
    Only fully copy the portions of the policydb that are affected by
    boolean changes to avoid the full cost of a deep policydb copy.
    Introduce another level of indirection for the sidtab since changing
    booleans does not require updating the sidtab, unlike policy load.
    While we are here, create a common helper for notifying
    other kernel components and userspace of a policy change and call it
    from both security_set_bools() and selinux_policy_commit().
    
    Based on an old (2004) patch by Kaigai Kohei [1] to convert the policy
    rwlock to RCU that was deferred at the time since it did not
    significantly improve performance and introduced complexity. Peter
    Enderborg later submitted a patch series to convert to RCU [2] that
    would have made changing booleans a much more expensive operation
    by requiring a full policydb_write();policydb_read(); sequence to
    deep copy the entire policydb and also had concerns regarding
    atomic allocations.
    
    This change is now simplified by the earlier work to encapsulate
    policy state in the selinux_policy struct and to refactor
    policy load.  After this change, the last major obstacle to
    converting the policy rwlock to RCU is likely the sidtab live
    convert support.
    
    [1] https://lore.kernel.org/selinux/6e2f9128-e191-ebb3-0e87-74bfccb0767f@tycho.nsa.gov/
    [2] https://lore.kernel.org/selinux/20180530141104.28569-1-peter.enderborg@sony.com/Signed-off-by: default avatarStephen Smalley <stephen.smalley.work@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul Moore <paul@paul-moore.com>
    c7c556f1
avtab.h 3.68 KB