Re: peculiar disappearance of most audit rules

[Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>]

What's the kernel in question?  audit hasn't used "inotify" in a long
time.  We now use "fsnotify".   but in either case, the inodes aren't
supposed to be able to be kicked out of core...

On Wed, 2014-04-23 at 09:04 +0100, Peter Grandi wrote:
> [ ... ]
> 
> > Thus I have come up with a potential explanation:
> 
> >   * The 'audit' module does not identify the watched file and
> >     directory by (device,ino) but by a pointer to an inode table
> >     entry, a bit like a filesystem module would.
> 
> I had a look at the code and it seems it relies on 'inotify' and
> the code does get pointers at the relevant in-memory inode
> descriptors.
> 
> >   * During treewalks a lot of inodes get cached in the in-memory
> >     inode table.
> >   * This creates pressure on the inode tables and thus the least
> >     used (in some sense) inodes get evicted, and this includes
> >     those for the "disappearing directories".
> >   * When these least used inodes are evicted the 'audit' module
> >     sees it as if it was a removal of the inode.
> 
> To corroborate this I have been running:
> 
>   while true
>   do
>     for D in $(< audit-names.txt)
>     do (cd "$D" && exec sleep 3001)&
>     done
>     sleep 3001
>   done
> 
> Which has the effect of marking the relevant directories as the
> active current directories of each 'sleep' process, and none of
> those directories were "disappeared" from the 'audit' active
> rules list.
> 
> The 'inotify' code has a comment that claims:
> 
> > * inode: Pinned so long as the inode is associated with a watch, from
> > * inotify_add_watch() to the final put_inotify_watch().
> 
> They use 'igrab'/'iput', and 'audit_tree.c' and 'audit_watch.c'
> uses them, so I wonder what is missing.
> 
> --
> Linux-audit mailing list
> Linux-audit@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-audit