uutils / uutils/coreutils

Improving performance of shared locale parsing

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#9,932 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Dominant language
Rust
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Description

In the SMACK feature implementation, a few locale lines were added and it reduced the performance of the benchmarks across many utilities by over 5%. This is because these utilities are so fast that the majority of their overhead is just in the locale parsing and they are very sensitive to changes in the amount of text in the locale files.

A fix for this would be to seperate the SELinux and SMACK locale information to be loaded only if the feature was enabled, or to investigate the bottlenecks related to loading the files to see if the impact on performance can be reduced

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reproducing the benchmark slowdown across the affected utilities and inspect the SMACK feature implementation together with the SELinux and SMACK locale loading paths. Measure whether conditional loading or file-loading overhead accounts for the regression. Done means the relevant benchmarks no longer show the reported performance loss without breaking locale behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
cli, performance
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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