Re: [PATCH RFC bpf-next 0/4] audit: Expose audit subsystem to BPF LSM programs via BPF kfuncs

Frederick Lawler
2026-03-18T17:49:52Z

Hi Alexei,

On Tue, Mar 17, 2026 at 06:15:59PM -0700, Alexei Starovoitov wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 16, 2026 at 7:44 PM Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi
> <memxor@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 11 Mar 2026 at 22:31, Frederick Lawler <fred@cloudflare.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > The motivation behind the change is to give BPF LSM developers the
> > > ability to report accesses via the audit subsystem much like how LSMs
> > > operate today.
>
> Sure, but bpf lsm-s don't need to follow such conventions.
> audit is nothing but a message passing from kernel to user space
> and done in a very inefficient way by wrapping strings into skb/netlink.
> bpf progs can do this message passing already via various ways:
> perfbuf, ringbuf, streams.
> Teach your user space to consume one of them.

Audit provides additional functionality by keeping messages close to the
syscall, and in-line with other messages for that syscall. Aside from
that, BPF is arguably too flexible. I'm sure it's already understood,
but the idea here is to reduce bespoke logging implementations and reduce
attack surface for violation reporting. Audit is already provided by the
kernel and a well leveraged pipeline.

WRT to performance characteristics, would you rather see this
implementation leverage those maps in a way to reduce that, background
workers, or something else? This is something we've considered, but left out
of RFC to collect more opinion on perf considerations.

Thanks for bring this up. I forgot to include that in the RFC cover, sorry.

Best,
Fred