Re: [PATCH ghak90 (was ghak32) V4 01/10] audit: collect audit task parameters

Guenter Roeck
2019-01-04T22:04:37Z

On Fri, Jan 04, 2019 at 09:57:35AM -0500, Richard Guy Briggs wrote:
> On 2019-01-03 18:50, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> > Hi Richard,
> >
> > On Tue, Jul 31, 2018 at 04:07:36PM -0400, Richard Guy Briggs wrote:
> > > The audit-related parameters in struct task_struct should ideally be
> > > collected together and accessed through a standard audit API.
> > >
> > > Collect the existing loginuid, sessionid and audit_context together in a
> > > new struct audit_task_info called "audit" in struct task_struct.
> > >
> > > Use kmem_cache to manage this pool of memory.
> > > Un-inline audit_free() to be able to always recover that memory.
> > >
> > > See: https://github.com/linux-audit/audit-kernel/issues/81
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Richard Guy Briggs <rgb@redhat.com>
> >
> > Overall I am not sure if keeping task_struct a bit smaller is worth
> > the added complexity, but I guess that is just me.
>
> The motivation was to consolidate all the audit bits into one pointer,
> isolating them from the rest of the kernel, restricting access only to
> helper functions to prevent abuse by other subsystems and trying to
> reduce kABI issues in the future. I agree it is a bit more complex. It
> was provoked by the need to add contid which seemed to make the most
> sense as a peer to loginuid and sessionid, and adding it to task_struct
> would have made it a bit too generic and available.
>
> This is addressed at some length by Paul Moore here in v2:
> https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/4/18/759
>
That makes sense. Thanks a lot for the clarification.

Guenter