SElinux and speed issues

[Daniel J Walsh]

Rob Brown-Bayliss wrote:
> Hi, some time ago, maybe a year of so I saw a post some where
> suggesting that disabling selinux would improve the speed of gnome
> (cant recall weather it was fedora specific or not) and I did and yes
> things (most notably menus and window opening and closing) were
> faster...
I think this is a red herring. I can think of no reason why XWindows 
would run faster with SELinux disabled.  SELinux only effects 
performance when an Access control decision is being made by the
kernel.  XWindows should not be going through the kernel for an access 
check.  SELinux memory footprint has decreased in the last year, which 
might help on a memory constrained machine.
>
> With the fc6 just around the corner I was wondering if this is still
> the case, and perhaps more importantly is selinux worth the hassel on
> a single user home desktop machine?
>
That is a matter of how much risk you are willing to accept.  If you run 
any network services on your machine, SELinux could prevent an 
escallation on a break in to your system.
> Thanks...
>