[Libguestfs] SELinux relabel API

[ I realized that we were discussing adding this feature, in various private email, IRC, and this long bugzilla thread: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1060423 That's not how we should do things. Let's discuss it on the mailing list. ] One thing that virt-customize/virt-sysprep/virt-builder have to do is relabel SELinux guests. What we do at the moment is run: if load_policy && fixfiles restore; then rm -f /.autorelabel else touch /.autorelabel echo '%s: SELinux relabelling failed, will relabel at boot instead.' fi while chrooted into the guest (using the 'guestfs_sh' API). This has a number of problems: - It has to load the policy using 'load_policy', but this doesn't work sometimes: * RHEL 5 load_policy takes a parameter. * Doesn't work if appliance kernel is significantly different from guest kernel version, because the binary policy format changes irregularly and is not backwards compatible. * Requires the appliance [host] kernel to be compiled with LSM/SELinux support. - Touching /.autorelabel is often broken, eg. it's broken in Fedora 20 because of systemd (RHBZ#1049656). - /etc/resolv.conf will not be relabelled if guestfs network is on, because of resolv.conf shenanigans in libguestfs.git/daemon/command.c - It requires running guest code, which we'd like to avoid. What would be nice would be to have an API to just do this relabelling. Libguestfs could change this API as required to handle different guests. Dan Walsh helpfully pointed out to us that we've been doing it wrong all along :-) A much better way to relabel is to run: setfiles /etc/selinux/targeted/contexts/files/file_contexts DIR where 'file_contexts' is a file which contains the default labels for files (a set of regexps), and 'DIR' is the directory at which relabelling starts. Note that 'setfiles' would be the libguestfs appliance binary, so no guest binary needs to be run. A simple API could just look like this: guestfs_selinux_relabel (g); which would always use the 'targeted' policy from the guest, and always start relabelling at the root. This would work fine for virt-builder. For Colin's requirements for Project Atomic, I suspect he will want to be able to set the file_contexts file and the root directory, but I'll leave him to describe what would be useful. A couple of notes: - I'd like to avoid baking in assumptions from the 'setfiles' command as far as possible. libguestfs APIs last for many years and some have caused us many years of regret (but that's our job) :-/ - Is it a good idea to tie this into inspection in some way -- for example, inspection could provide us with the path to the current or default SELinux policy. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines. Tiny program with many powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc. http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top