Today we analyzed a weird issue one of our SELinux users had with their system. He had a denial when calling audit2allow, informing us that sysadm_t had no rights to read the SELinux policy. This is a known issue that has been resolved in our current SELinux policy repository but which needs to be pushed to the tree (which is my job, sorry about that). The problem however is when he added the policy - it didn't work.

Even worse, sesearch told us that the policy has been modified correctly - but it still doesn't work. Check your policy with sestatus and seinfo and they're all saying things are working well. And yet ... things don't. Apparently, all policy changes are ignored.

The reason? There was a policy.29 file in /etc/selinux/mcs/policy which was always loaded, even though the user already edited /etc/selinux/semanage.conf to have policy-version set to 28.

It is already a problem that we need to tell users to edit semanage.conf to a fixed version (because binary version 29 is not supported by most Linux kernels as it has been very recently introduced) but having load_policy (which is called by semodule when a policy needs to be loaded) loading a stale policy.29 file is just... disappointing.

Anyway - if you see weird behavior, check both the semanage.conf file (and set policy-version = 28) as well as the contents of your /etc/selinux/*/policy directory. If you see any policy.* that isn't version 28, delete them.