initlog and syslogd performance with setfiles
Russell Coker
russell at coker.com.au
Thu Oct 6 04:58:56 UTC 2005
Initlog can save up a large number of log entries (particularly if logging a
SE Linux relabel). If these are processed by syslogd synchronously then the
performance is very poor and the system apparently can be running for quite a
while before the boot messages are logged. Another possible issue is the
memory use of initlog, if using a machine with the minimum recommended RAM
(256M) it is not inconceivable that initlog could run out of memory which
would probably break things in a bad way (relabel happens before swapon).
This was brought to my attention when a RHEL4 user spoke of the "feature"
whereby the files would be relabeled in the background. Of course it turned
out that the relabelling was not happening in the background it was merely
the logging that was happening after the system boot.
I think it would make sense to have this data written directly to a log file
under /var/log (/var/log/setfiles or something).
How about the following:
LOGFILE=/var/log/setfiles
SYSLOGFLAG=""
--
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