From: guido@trentalancia.com (Guido Trentalancia)
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:09:46 +0100
Subject: [refpolicy] text relocations for Altera Quartus II
In-Reply-To: <20110320221223.5f5acb00@city-fan.org>
References: <1300471770.14419.23.camel@tesla.lan>
	<201103191044.51855.russell@coker.com.au>
	<1300546556.3034.17.camel@tesla.lan>
	<20110320221223.5f5acb00@city-fan.org>
Message-ID: <1300662586.3108.22.camel@tesla.lan>
To: refpolicy@oss.tresys.com
List-Id: refpolicy.oss.tresys.com

Hi Paul,

thanks for sharing your experience.

On Sun, 2011-03-20 at 22:12 +0000, Paul Howarth wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Mar 2011 15:55:56 +0100
> Guido Trentalancia <guido@trentalancia.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hello Russell !
> > 
> > On Sat, 19/03/2011 at 10.44 +1100, Russell Coker wrote:
> > > On Sat, 19 Mar 2011, Guido Trentalancia <guido@trentalancia.com>
> > > wrote:
> > > > Up until the beginning of this year the Altera Quartus II
> > > > (free/web edition) for Linux was requiring text relocations on
> > > > most of the dynamic libraries shipped with the package (not open
> > > > source). Many people on the Altera forum were just disabling
> > > > SELinux and to the best of my knowledge Altera did not provide
> > > > fixed binaries.
> > > > 
> > > > If it is of any interest to anybody, I could do some more detailed
> > > > research and get back with the list of files that would need to
> > > > be added to system/libraries.fc (provided that the installer has
> > > > a default location which I cannot remember now).
> > > 
> > > Why would we want to add support for such non-free software?
> > 
> > The web edition is free software. It is not open-source.
> > 
> > In any case, the following should be considered:
> > - it hasn't got an equivalent (at present there are packages in
> > libraries.fc that have open-source equivalents, e.g. Acrobat Reader,
> > Realplayer);
> > - it is software from a vendor to support its own hardware products,
> > so it's very specific;
> > - users are unable to run it and are therefore are disabling SELinux
> > which is worse;
> > - it is widely used in universities and distributed for free with RTL
> > design books;
> > - I do not care personally as my installation had been fixed locally
> > long time ago within seconds.
> > 
> > > That seems likely to get us more uncontrolled growth in .fc entries
> > > and less benefit than most things that we might do, particularly as
> > > they have an "installer" rather than using .deb or .rpm.
> > 
> > Well, if the installer has a default base installation path, then
> > there won't me much difference...
> > 
> > > Why not just write a blog post about how the user can run chcon
> > > after installation and also describe how Altera could fix their
> > > build environment?
> > 
> > Done already on the Altera forum. But no reply from Altera. I am not
> > connected with them in any way, it's just something that I need to
> > use. For fairness now, I shall mention that a similar products from
> > Xilinx are also available.
> 
> I got some similar file contexts for EMC NetWorker (an "enterprise"
> backup solution) added in Fedora and RHEL just by posting on
> fedora-selinux-list. That was another vendor that was suggesting to
> turn off SELinux for the want of a few context fixes (they actually
> package their software in RPMs so the contexts are set up correctly on
> install now, which is completely painless :-)).

To the best of my knowledge Altera has never suggested to disable
SELinux (or to enable it). Users on the forum were suggesting that as
mutual help.

It's just a minor thing though. Because we'll never reach an end if we
were to test and support every application that is available for Linux.

Regards,

Guido