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Date:   Tue, 16 Jul 2019 12:26:16 -0400
From:   Richard Guy Briggs <rgb@redhat.com>
To:     Paul Moore <paul@paul-moore.com>
Cc:     Tycho Andersen <tycho@tycho.ws>, nhorman@tuxdriver.com,
        linux-api@vger.kernel.org, containers@lists.linux-foundation.org,
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        simo@redhat.com, netdev@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, Eric Paris <eparis@parisplace.org>,
        "Serge E. Hallyn" <serge@hallyn.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH ghak90 V6 02/10] audit: add container id
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On 2019-07-16 12:08, Paul Moore wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 11:37 AM Richard Guy Briggs <rgb@redhat.com> wrote:
> > On 2019-07-15 17:09, Paul Moore wrote:
> > > On Mon, Jul 8, 2019 at 2:12 PM Richard Guy Briggs <rgb@redhat.com> wrote:
> > > > On 2019-05-30 19:26, Paul Moore wrote:
> > >
> > > ...
> > >
> > > > > I like the creativity, but I worry that at some point these
> > > > > limitations are going to be raised (limits have a funny way of doing
> > > > > that over time) and we will be in trouble.  I say "trouble" because I
> > > > > want to be able to quickly do an audit container ID comparison and
> > > > > we're going to pay a penalty for these larger values (we'll need this
> > > > > when we add multiple auditd support and the requisite record routing).
> > > > >
> > > > > Thinking about this makes me also realize we probably need to think a
> > > > > bit longer about audit container ID conflicts between orchestrators.
> > > > > Right now we just take the value that is given to us by the
> > > > > orchestrator, but if we want to allow multiple container orchestrators
> > > > > to work without some form of cooperation in userspace (I think we have
> > > > > to assume the orchestrators will not talk to each other) we likely
> > > > > need to have some way to block reuse of an audit container ID.  We
> > > > > would either need to prevent the orchestrator from explicitly setting
> > > > > an audit container ID to a currently in use value, or instead generate
> > > > > the audit container ID in the kernel upon an event triggered by the
> > > > > orchestrator (e.g. a write to a /proc file).  I suspect we should
> > > > > start looking at the idr code, I think we will need to make use of it.
> > > >
> > > > To address this, I'd suggest that it is enforced to only allow the
> > > > setting of descendants and to maintain a master list of audit container
> > > > identifiers (with a hash table if necessary later) that includes the
> > > > container owner.
> > >
> > > We're discussing the audit container ID management policy elsewhere in
> > > this thread so I won't comment on that here, but I did want to say
> > > that we will likely need something better than a simple list of audit
> > > container IDs from the start.  It's common for systems to have
> > > thousands of containers now (or multiple thousands), which tells me
> > > that a list is a poor choice.  You mentioned a hash table, so I would
> > > suggest starting with that over the list for the initial patchset.
> >
> > I saw that as an internal incremental improvement that did not affect
> > the API, so I wanted to keep things a bit simpler (as you've requested
> > in the past) to get this going, and add that enhancement later.
> 
> In general a simple approach is a good way to start when the
> problem/use-case is not very well understood; in other words, don't
> spend a lot of time/effort optimizing something you don't yet
> understand.  In this case we know that people want to deploy a *lot*
> of containers on a single system so we should design the data
> structures appropriately.  A list is simply not a good fit here, I
> believe/hope you know that too.

Yes, I knew that, which is why I alluded to a hash table...

> > I'll start working on it now.  The hash table would simply point to
> > lists anyways unless you can recommend a better approach.
> 
> I assume when you say "point to lists" you are talking about using
> lists for the hash buckets?  If so, yes that should be fine at this
> point.  In general if the per-bucket lists become a bottleneck we can
> look at the size of the table (or make it tunable) or even use a
> different approach entirely.  Ultimately the data store is an
> implementation detail private to the audit subsystem in the kernel so
> we should be able to change it as necessary without breaking anything.

Yes, this is what I had in mind.  It would be tunable either by a macro
or a config option, so the exact value isn't a critical implementation
detail that can be easily tuned as we gain experience with it.  And yes,
the intent was that it was a non-user-perceivable implementation choice
other than performace metrics.

> paul moore

- RGB

--
Richard Guy Briggs <rgb@redhat.com>
Sr. S/W Engineer, Kernel Security, Base Operating Systems
Remote, Ottawa, Red Hat Canada
IRC: rgb, SunRaycer
Voice: +1.647.777.2635, Internal: (81) 32635