Re: XFS and SE Linux

On Wed, 10 Mar 2004 01:00, Stephen Smalley <sds@epoch.ncsc.mil> wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-03-09 at 08:14, Russell Coker wrote:
> > Currently in SE Linux the contexts for files are of the form
> > "system_u:object_r:file_t", why not express them on disk as
> > "system_u:file_t"? Saving 9 bytes in this manner could make some of them
> > fit into a 256 byte Inode in XFS which would be a significant advantage.
> > Also for Ext2/Ext3 it will save some space as well.
>
> Why not just fix XFS to handle xattrs sanely?

I have sent an email to some SGI people with some ideas that I think would be beneficial. However doing such changes would take some time. They need to have some sort of compatibility flag in the on-disk structure, some new data structures on disk, and a new fsck that understands both old and new formats. This isn't going to happen overnight. While a change to the way security.selinux is used by the kernel can be implemented much more easily.

-- 
http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/   My NSA Security Enhanced Linux packages
http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/  Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark
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http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/  My home page

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