[systemd-devel] How to make udev not touch my device?

[Michal Privoznik]

Hey udev developers,

I'm a libvirt developer and I've been facing an interesting issue
recently. Libvirt is a library for managing virtual machines and as such
allows basically any device to be exposed to a virtual machine. For
instance, a virtual machine can use /dev/sdX as its own disk. Because of
security reasons we allow users to configure their VMs to run under
different UID/GID and also SELinux context. That means that whenever a
VM is being started up, libvirtd (our daemon we have) relabels all the
necessary paths that QEMU process (representing VM) can touch.
However, I'm facing an issue that I don't know how to fix. In some cases
QEMU can close & reopen a block device. However, closing a block device
triggers an event and hence if there is a rule that sets a security
label on a device the QEMU process is unable to reopen the device again.

My question is, whet we can do to prevent udev from mangling with our
security labels that we've set on the devices?

One of the ideas our lead developer had was for libvirt to set some kind
of udev label on devices managed by libvirt (when setting up security
labels) and then whenever udev sees such labelled device it won't touch
it at all (this could be achieved by a rule perhaps?). Later, when
domain is shutting down libvirt removes that label. But I don't think
setting an arbitrary label on devices is supported, is it?

Michal