linux-kernel - Performance degradation measurement [was Re: [PATCH 06/37] Security: Separate task security context from task

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Date:	Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:12:08 +0000
From:	David Howells <dhowells@...hat.com>
To:	akpm@...ux-foundation.org, torvalds@...l.org
Cc:	dhowells@...hat.com, Trond.Myklebust@...app.com,
	chuck.lever@...cle.com, nfsv4@...ux-nfs.org,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org,
	selinux@...ho.nsa.gov, linux-security-module@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Performance degradation measurement [was Re: [PATCH 06/37] Security: Separate task security context from task_struct [ver #34]]

David Howells <dhowells@...hat.com> wrote:

> Separate the task security context from task_struct.  At this point, the
> security data is temporarily embedded in the task_struct with two pointers
> pointing to it.

This patch degrades performance of the kernel in general.  This is because
accessing the security data (UID, GID, groups list, LSM security pointer, etc)
requires an extra dereference (eg: task->uid => task->act_as->uid).

I've done some benchmarking to attempt to determine what the degradation is.

Firstly, the setup: my test machine has a Core 2 Duo CPU and a gig of RAM.  The
system is running as limited a set of daemons as I can get away with - this
means no syslogd, no klogd - as these can make the timings unstable.
Basically, init, mgetty, sshd and auditd are it.

On the test machines's disk is a test partition with 266 directories and 19255
files distributed across those directories.  For each test, the system is
rebooted, then the test partition is mounted:

	mount /dev/sda6 /var/fscache/ -o user_xattr,noatime,ro

and the test program attached is run a couple of times to make sure that the
disk backing that partition need not be touched again (the whole metadata fits
in RAM):

	time /tmp/openit /var/fscache

Then the program is run nine times in succession and the 'real' values emitted
by the time program are averaged.

The program stats and opens each regular file and directory in the tree,
reading and recursing into each directory.  It does not read any data from the
regular files as this is likely to swamp the variance due to this security
patch.

So, I did five runs with different sets of patches and configurations:

 (1) SELinux enabled, none of the security patches:

	(gdb) p (1.119+1.110+1.104+1.106+1.095+1.112+1.094+1.091+1.112)/9
	$3 = 1.104777777777777

 (2) SELinux enabled, all the security patches:

	(gdb) p (1.204+1.190+1.182+1.190+1.200+1.205+1.199+1.197+1.209)/9
	$2 = 1.1973333333333329

The percentage degradation is:

	(gdb) p 1.1973333333333329/1.104777777777777
	$4 = 1.0837775319320126

or about 8.4%.

I then created a performance improvement patch (attached) to reduce the number
of times current->act_as was calculated and applied that:

 (3) SELinux enabled, all the security patches plus performance patch:

	(gdb) p (1.212+1.161+1.202+1.205+1.203+1.151+1.195+1.205+1.186)/9
	$2 = 1.1911111111111106

The percentage degradation is

	(gdb) p 1.1911111111111106/1.104777777777777
	$3 = 1.0781454289449866

about 7.8%.

I then turned SELinux off to see how much of a difference that made:

 (4) LSM/SELinux disabled, none of the security patches:

	(gdb) p (1.121+1.136+1.137+1.121+1.122+1.131+1.121+1.131+1.118)/9
	$7 = 1.1264444444444437

 (5) LSM/SELinux disabled, all the security patches:

	(gdb) p (1.120+1.129+1.116+1.115+1.114+1.129+1.127+1.124+1.128)/9
	$6 = 1.1224444444444437

This resulted in an improvement, which is slightly odd:

	(gdb) p 1.1224444444444437/1.1264444444444437
	$8 = 0.99644900374827372

or about -0.4%.

For some reason the results returned by the time program are quite variable,
but I'm not sure why.  I suspect that with SELinux off, the difference in times
is within the variance of the results.

The performance improvement patch can probably be itself improved by passing
the calculated value of current->act_as down into LSM hooks instead of current
if the former is available.  Similarly, passing this into capable() or similar
could probably improve things too, but there are a couple of problems there as
the auditing code in SELinux's task_has_capability() wants to access the
task_struct for pid and comm:-/

David

View attachment "openit.c" of type "text/x-c" (1437 bytes)

View attachment "15-security-speed-ext3.diff" of type "text/x-c" (6600 bytes)