I have just noticed that there is no magic number in the policy database! This means that if something goes slightly wrong (say a file system error replaces the file with some other file but keeps the same inode) then you won't easily be able to tell (especially if it happens to start with 0x00080000 for 2.4.17 or 0x00070000 for 2.4.16).

Could we have a magic number for the next version?

We could make the file start with the string "@SeLiNuX*PoLiCy@", as an example (there are billions of strings which are easily identifiable even by strings(1) which are also uniquely identifiable by file(1) and which are extremely unlikely to occur by accident which would do just as well). Then we could have a magic entry for it which would allow easy display of the version number, the number of items in the object context array, etc.

Basically this would allow us to save lots of people all the effort of reading through source code that I just went through before realising that I was compiling against the old header file.

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http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/     Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark
http://www.coker.com.au/postal/       Postal SMTP/POP benchmark
http://www.coker.com.au/projects.html Projects I am working on
http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/     My home page

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You have received this message because you are subscribed to the selinux list. If you no longer wish to subscribe, send mail to majordomo@tycho.nsa.gov with the words "unsubscribe selinux" without quotes as the message. Received on Wed 16 Jan 2002 - 18:10:22 EST