[PATCH v1 0/3] setfiles: control relabeling parallelism from the environment

From: Johnny Boero <[email protected]>

Hi,

This is the patch for the RFE at
https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/issues/489, where a package
upgrade on an 88 core machine spent hours in restorecon with 87 cores
idle.  Stephen Smalley and Christian Göttsche both indicated on the
issue that switching the default thread count to 0 would be acceptable;
patch 2 does that, and patch 3 adds the environment variable the RFE
originally asked for.

Patches 2 and 3 are independent and either can be taken without the
other.

Patch 1 is a small fix noticed while touching the same code: "-T -1" is
currently accepted by strtoull(3) and wraps around to SIZE_MAX threads
instead of producing a usage error.

Patch 2 changes the setfiles(8)/restorecon(8) default from 1 thread to 0,
i.e. one thread per available CPU core.  Only the tools change; the
selinux_restorecon_parallel(3) default is untouched, so library callers
are unaffected.

Patch 3 adds RESTORECON_THREADS, with the same meaning as -T, which takes
precedence.  The motivation is reach: relabeling is driven from package
scriptlets and init scripts that a user cannot edit.  On the Fedora 44
system used for testing, 10 installed packages run restorecon from their
scriptlets and none of them pass -T, so the environment is the only way
to influence them without patching every spec file in the distribution.
An invalid value warns and is ignored rather than being fatal, since the
variable is inherited by every child process.

Measured with a dry run relabel of /usr/share (~588k files) on an 88 core
system:

  -T 1 / RESTORECON_THREADS=1   ~24s, 99% CPU
  default after this series     ~16s, ~1000% CPU

The speedup here is bounded by the directory walk and the syscall mix of
a dry run; a real relabel that writes contexts benefits more.

Two things I would like feedback on:

- Whether RESTORECON_THREADS is the right name, given the same binary is
  also setfiles(8).
- Whether an invalid value should warn and continue, as it does here, or
  be fatal.

Note that this series does not reach libsemanage, which calls
selinux_restorecon(3) single threaded on the policy store, or rpm's
selinux plugin, which labels each file inline with lsetfilecon(3) and
never goes through restorecon at all.  Both looked out of scope here.

Johnny Boero (3):
  policycoreutils/setfiles: reject invalid -T arguments
  policycoreutils/setfiles: use all CPU cores by default
  policycoreutils/setfiles: honor RESTORECON_THREADS

 policycoreutils/setfiles/restorecon.8 | 19 +++++++++--
 policycoreutils/setfiles/setfiles.8   | 20 +++++++++--
 policycoreutils/setfiles/setfiles.c   | 48 ++++++++++++++++++++++++---
 3 files changed, 79 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)

-- 
2.55.0