qsort() and /proc/meminfo

[Florian Weimer]

* Ian Pilcher:

> I am writing an SELinux policy for a service written in Python, and I've
> discovered that Python calls qsort(), which wants to read /proc/meminfo.
> I'm not enthusiastic about the prospect of granting this access, since
> it will mean allowing read access to almost all of /proc.
>
> What are the potential pitfalls of preventing qsort() from reading
> /proc/meminfo?

You could end up with swapping/thrashing, or the OOM killer might kill
some process.  In general, the effect should be rather benign.

Upgrading glibc will get rid of this /proc dependency, but of course
may introduce others (we pretty much assume a mounted /proc these
days).