Refactoring src/ausearch-report.c:output_interpreted_node()

Steve Grubb sgrubb at redhat.com
Wed Oct 1 21:24:25 UTC 2014


On Wednesday, October 01, 2014 05:19:39 PM Steve Grubb wrote:
> On Thursday, October 02, 2014 07:08:13 AM Burn Alting wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-10-01 at 14:54 -0400, Steve Grubb wrote:
> > > > I am uncertain what effect of accepting this additional format would
> > > > have when adding rules to the running audit system - i.e.
> > > > audit_name_to_msg_type() is called by autrace/auditctl when parsing
> > > > rules (ie the msgtype field name).
> > > 
> > > I think ausearch-report.c might be the place that needs updating.
> > 
> > So, could we modify output_interpreted_node() to no longer re-parse the
> > 
> >    [node=<node>] type=<type> msg=audit(<epochsecs>.<msecs>:<serial>)
> > 
> > header and pass both the lnode and llist->e which has this data already
> > as the code
> > 
> >           if (num == -1) {
> >           
> >               // see if we are older and wiser now.
> >               bptr = strchr(str, '[');
> >               if (bptr && bptr < ptr) {
> >                   char *eptr;
> >                   bptr++;
> >                   eptr = strchr(bptr, ']');
> >                   if (eptr) {
> >                        *eptr = 0;
> >                        errno = 0;
> >                        num = strtoul(bptr, NULL, 10);
> >                        *eptr = ']';
> >                        if (errno)
> >                            num = -1;
> >                   }
> >                }
> >          }
> > 
> > which parses for
> > 
> >     type=.*[n].*
> > 
> > is no longer needed as we don't have that format any more?
> 
> That is a very loose check for UNKNOWN[####]. If you see a performance
> improvement by refactoring this function, please send a patch. The output
> needs to be identical to the old way.

Note that this section of code is on the "slow path". The value of interest 
extraction and matching is the performance critical area. Once an event is 
selected for output, the tty scrolling and buffering probably dominate the 
speed. So, I would take a patch to optimize this, but I don't expect it to 
make a big difference.

-Steve




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