Re: [PATCH 1/3] selftests/audit: Add syscall overhead benchmark

[Stanislav Kinsburskii <skinsburskii@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Sep 01, 2026 at 05:35:12PM -0400, Paul Moore wrote:
> On Aug  6, 2026 Stanislav Kinsburskii <skinsburskii@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Add a microbenchmark which repeatedly invokes getpid(2) and reports the
> > per-operation latency across multiple repetitions. The workload avoids
> > filesystem and other syscall-specific work so the fixed audit syscall
> > overhead remains visible.
> > 
> > The benchmark deliberately leaves audit policy management to the caller.
> > This permits comparisons with increasing numbers of unrelated exit rules
> > and with automatically removed watch or tree rules without modifying an
> > existing policy unexpectedly.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Stanislav Kinsburskii <skinsburskii@gmail.com>
> > ---
> >  MAINTAINERS                                 |   1 +
> >  tools/testing/selftests/Makefile            |   1 +
> >  tools/testing/selftests/audit/.gitignore    |   2 +
> >  tools/testing/selftests/audit/Makefile      |   9 ++
> >  tools/testing/selftests/audit/README        |  30 ++++
> >  tools/testing/selftests/audit/audit_bench.c | 227 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> >  6 files changed, 270 insertions(+)
> 
> Thanks for this Stanislav, but I'm not certain that we want to merge this
> into the kernel and have this become the defacto standard for audit
> performance.  It's a simple, easy to understand test, but I worry that it
> might be too simplistic to properly characterize audit performance.
> 
> ... and no, I'm sorry, but I don't have a better suggestion off the top
> of my head :)
> 
> However, audit_bench might be useful as part of the manual_tests in the
> audit-testsuite?
> 
>  https://github.com/linux-audit/audit-testsuite
> 

Sure, here is a PR: https://github.com/linux-audit/audit-testsuite/pull/129

Thanks,
Stanislav

> --
> paul-moore.com