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Portal 2 Incompatible With SELinux
jones_supa writes "Valve has recently released Portal 2 on Steam for Linux and opened a GitHub entry to gather all the bugs from the community. When one of the Valve developers closed a bug related to Portal 2 recommending that the users disable a security feature, the Linux community reacted. A crash is caused by the game's interaction with SELinux, the Linux kernel subsystem that deals with access control security policies. Portal 2 uses the third-party Miles Sound System MP3 decoder which, in turn, uses execheap, a feature that is normally disabled by SELinux. Like its name suggests, execheap allows a program to map a part of the memory so that it is both writable and executable. This could be a problem if someone chose to use that particular memory section for buffer overflow attacks; that would eventually permit the hacker to gain access to the system by running code. In the end, Valve developer David W. took responsibility of the problem: 'I apologize for the mis-communication: Some underlying infrastructure our games rely on is incompatible with SELinux. We are hoping to correct this. Of course closing this bug isn't appropriate and I am re-opening it.' This is more of an upstream problem for Valve. It's not something that they can fix directly, and most likely they will have to talk with the Miles developers and try to repair the problem from that direction."
Why does a decoder need execheap? Is there some sort of optimization that causes the processing and data to be not separated? It sounds like an invitation for all kind of exploits (which is presumably why it is banned by execheap).
Also, is there a reason to use a specific MP3 decoder? Is it because of licensing, or are there technical reasons?
I think it's a culture clash of developers who've only worked in a Windows environment and consequently are used to turning off operating system security so they can run a program, usually a game, vs. the Linux community who inherited the Unix culture where you can play games on the operating system, but you can't play games with the operating system.
Without allowing code to be switched between writable and executable, how can dynamic recompilation work at all? Otherwise, your OS becomes iOS, whose strict W^X policy forbids third-party JIT engines.
you just need to allow the portal2 binary to use execheap. Now obviously its not good that portal2 uses execheap, but SELinux is fine grained enough to allow for it.
While not false, the cost associated with NOT relying on third party tools also means that smaller studios could not possibly develop anything halfway competitive. Larger studios in turn would have to dedicate far more resources to developing the underlying basic engines rather than content.
Yes, reliance on third party tools, APIs, engines and libraries makes you dependent on them. But it also frees a lot of resources that you can invest in the game rather than developing its foundation.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.