What is expected: exclude action on the never list?

[Linda Knippers]

Michael C Thompson wrote:
> Linda Knippers wrote:
> 
>> Steve Grubb wrote:
>>
>>> On Tuesday 30 May 2006 16:45, Michael C Thompson wrote:
>>>
>>>> I would read the second rule as saying "do not exclude messages of type
>>>> SYSCALL". Is this a correct interpretation of the rule?
>>>
>>>
>>> That sounds reasonable, but I don't think that's what the kernel
>>> does. Maybe it should be corrected. I think its a 1 or 2 liner.
>>
>>
>> According to the manpage, I'd say the kernel is behaving as expected.
>>
>> "Never" means never generate an audit record and "exclude" means even if
>> one was generated, it should be excluded.  The two options together are
>> somewhat redundant but I don't think "never" was intended to mean "never
>> do what the previous option just said to do", at least not according to
>> the manpage.
> 
> 
> Agreed. The wording is... confusing when compared to the rule. I guess
> the real question which needs to be answered is "Do we need to be able
> to force the capture of a rule?"... since audit by default does not
> audit anything, and you have to explicitly add filters, I would say "no"
> to this question.
> 
> That said, I think we should leave "exclude,always" as is, and either
> change the man page to say something about "exclude,never" being the
> same as "exclude,always", _or_ change the userspace to indicate that
> "exclude,never" doesn't make sense.

I'm not sure "always" makes sense either, at least not as described in
the manpage since it says to always write out record at syscall exit
time.

-- ljk