linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v4 1/3] selinux: Introduce a new config to make avc cache slot size adjustable

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Message-ID: <5364449d2011c1d394a7bb30109b923d@paul-moore.com>
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2025 18:24:24 -0400
From: Paul Moore <paul@...l-moore.com>
To: Hongru Zhang <zhanghongru06@...il.com>, stephen.smalley.work@...il.com, omosnace@...hat.com
Cc: linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, selinux@...r.kernel.org, zhanghongru@...omi.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v4 1/3] selinux: Introduce a new config to make avc cache  slot size adjustable

On Oct 23, 2025 Hongru Zhang <zhanghongru06@...il.com> wrote:
> 
> On mobile device high-load situations, permission check can happen
> more than 90,000/s (8 core system). With default 512 cache nodes
> configuration, avc cache miss happens more often and occasionally
> leads to long time (>2ms) irqs off on both big and little cores,
> which decreases system real-time capability.
> 
> An actual call stack is as follows:
>  => avc_compute_av
>  => avc_perm_nonode
>  => avc_has_perm_noaudit
>  => selinux_capable
>  => security_capable
>  => capable
>  => __sched_setscheduler
>  => do_sched_setscheduler
>  => __arm64_sys_sched_setscheduler
>  => invoke_syscall
>  => el0_svc_common
>  => do_el0_svc
>  => el0_svc
>  => el0t_64_sync_handler
>  => el0t_64_sync
> 
> Although we can expand avc nodes through /sys/fs/selinux/cache_threshold
> to mitigate long time irqs off, hash conflicts make the bucket average
> length longer because of the fixed size of cache slots, leading to
> avc_search_node() latency increase.
> 
> So introduce a new config to make avc cache slot size also configurable,
> and with fine tuning, we can mitigate long time irqs off with slightly
> avc_search_node() performance regression.
> 
> Theoretically, the main overhead is memory consumption.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Hongru Zhang <zhanghongru@...omi.com>
> ---
>  security/selinux/Kconfig | 11 +++++++++++
>  security/selinux/avc.c   |  6 +++---
>  2 files changed, 14 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

Merged into selinux/dev, thanks!

--
paul-moore.com