Re: pipewire etc

Dominick Grift <[email protected]> Sat, 27 Jun 2026 08:19:47 +0200
Newsgroups org.kernel.vger.selinux-refpolicy
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Russell Coker <[email protected]> writes:

> Why do we need different policies for alsa, pipewire, and pulseaudio?  They 
> all do the same things, why not just have an audioserver policy that supports 
> all of them?

Why change now? Pulseaudio has a troublesome past and design and
supporting that would affect the quality of the pipewire domain. Some of
the issues with pa may have improved over time but then the question is
where to draw the line with regards to compatibility.

>
> Why do we need an ifdef for server vs user operation of pipewire?  Why not 
> just have a policy with a pipewire_t for the system daemon and pipewire_user_t 
> for the user process?

https://github.com/SELinuxProject/refpolicy/pull/1109

In theory your suggestion is prettiest but it is probably debatable
whether its worth the extra work. Running pipewire as a system service
is fairly unusual and I do suspect that the two scenarios are
mutually exclusive any way.

>
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/
> PipeWire#Sharing_audio_devices_with_computers_on_the_network
>
> For people wondering as I did why we even need a pipewire_user_t domain, the 
> above section of the Arch Wiki documents sharing audio via Airplay and RTP 
> among others - definitely need that isolated!
>
> Is a pipewire_client_t domain just for the test program really useful?
>
> It looks like the policy is well structured and replacing the cruft from years 
> of support of alsa and pulseaudio is a good thing.  So I think we should go 
> all the way and delete the separate policy for the old sound servers.

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Dominick Grift
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