[PATCH] selinux: Reduce memory use by avtab

This patch improves memory use by SELinux by both reducing the avtab node
size and reducing the number of avtab nodes.  The memory savings are
substantial, e.g.  on a 64-bit system after boot, James Morris reported the
following data for the targeted and strict policies:

            #objs  objsize   kernmem
Targeted:
  Before:  237888       40     9.1MB
  After:    19968       24     468KB

Strict:
  Before:  571680       40   21.81MB
  After:   221052       24    5.06MB

The improvement in memory use comes at a cost in the speed of security
server computations of access vectors, but these computations are only
required on AVC cache misses, and performance measurements by James Morris
using a number of benchmarks have shown that the change does not cause any
significant degradation.

Note that a rebuilt policy via an updated policy toolchain
(libsepol/checkpolicy) is required in order to gain the full benefits of
this patch, although some memory savings benefits are immediately applied
even to older policies (in particular, the reduction in avtab node size).
Sources for the updated toolchain are presently available from the
sourceforge CVS tree (http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=21266), and
tarballs are available from http://www.flux.utah.edu/~sds.

Signed-off-by: Stephen Smalley <sds@tycho.nsa.gov>
Signed-off-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/security/selinux/include/security.h b/security/selinux/include/security.h
index 71c0a19c9753..5f016c98056f 100644
--- a/security/selinux/include/security.h
+++ b/security/selinux/include/security.h
@@ -23,10 +23,11 @@
 #define POLICYDB_VERSION_NLCLASS        18
 #define POLICYDB_VERSION_VALIDATETRANS  19
 #define POLICYDB_VERSION_MLS            19
+#define POLICYDB_VERSION_AVTAB          20
 
 /* Range of policy versions we understand*/
 #define POLICYDB_VERSION_MIN   POLICYDB_VERSION_BASE
-#define POLICYDB_VERSION_MAX   POLICYDB_VERSION_MLS
+#define POLICYDB_VERSION_MAX   POLICYDB_VERSION_AVTAB
 
 #ifdef CONFIG_SECURITY_SELINUX_BOOTPARAM
 extern int selinux_enabled;