Re: [PATCH] Add support for UTF-8 in file context labels

[Petr Lautrbach <lautrbach@redhat.com>]

Thiébaud Weksteen <tweek@google.com> writes:

> On Tue, Mar 3, 2026 at 11:39 PM Petr Lautrbach <lautrbach@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> - libselinux to be able to read UTF-8 spec entries
>> - libselinux to compile regexes with UTF strings and unicode properties
>
> Thanks Petr. I'm a bit worried about the performance impact here of
> always enabling UTF support. Were you able to run benchmarks on this
> change? Android's file_contexts [1] could be useful data here. If the
> impact is non-negligible, could this feature be behind an option for
> selabel_file, something like SELABEL_OPT_UTF?
>
> [1] https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/+/android-latest-release:system/sepolicy/private/file_contexts

I've run perf on
`setfiles /etc/selinux/targeted/contexts/files/file_contexts /` and if I
get it right there's about 5% overhead in libpcre2 when it's used with
PCRE2_UTF.

I'll prepare another patch where support for UTF8 could be disabled
during build time, e.g.

    make LIBDIR=/usr/lib64 SHLIBDIR=/lib64 DISABLE_UTF=y install


Petr