Re: Time to remove compat_net?

[Joshua Brindle <method@manicmethod.com>]

Karl MacMillan wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-08-30 at 16:33 -0400, Paul Moore wrote:
>   
>> On Thursday, August 30 2007 4:12:24 pm Stephen Smalley wrote:
>>     
>>> On Thu, 2007-08-30 at 16:07 -0400, Paul Moore wrote:
>>>       
>>>> Does anyone have any objections to placing the compat_net code on the
>>>> kernel's "feature removal schedule" (I'd go for removal in 2/2008, six
>>>> months from now)?  SECMARK can do everything that the older compat_net
>>>> controls can do, and it does it with less overhead and a cleaner
>>>> implementation.
>>>>         
>>> I'd be happy to see it go (conditional checks considered harmful), but a
>>> good starting point would be to get secmark turned on in Fedora (it was
>>> still off last I looked) and verify that nothing breaks.
>>>
>>> We also don't have any tools capable of managing secmark today; with the
>>> legacy controls, we could labels ports and netifs via semanage.  Only
>>> secmark userland integration to date has been the basic iptables command
>>> line support.
>>>       
>> Okay RedHat guys ... are there any plans to migrate semanage over to using the 
>> SECMARK controls?
>>     
>
> I have argued in the past that making semanage handle secmark is the
> wrong approach. Basically - the whole point of using secmark is that you
> get the full power of iptables. If we force updates through semanage
> then you either a) recreate all of iptables in semanage or b) seriously
> cripple the mechanism through a restricted interface.
>
>   

I completely agree with this.

>>   If not, what do you need (besides patches to semanage) to 
>> make the transition?
>>
>>     
>
> What more do you mean other than setting compat_net to 0?
>   

In the past we talked about solving some of the usability problems with 
secmark, namely that its difficult to manage the secmark rules 
separately from the normal rules without causing issues (like when 
running /etc/init.d/iptables stop makes all traffic turn unlabeled and 
stop working). One potential solution was to make a new table for 
secmark that would be managed differently, we never came to a consensus 
here though.


--
This message was distributed to subscribers of the selinux mailing list.
If you no longer wish to subscribe, send mail to majordomo@tycho.nsa.gov with
the words "unsubscribe selinux" without quotes as the message.