For the past few days, I’ve been receiving SELinux denials every few hours popping up. I’m not exactly sure what it means – I’ve tried to google, but searching for ‘perfmon’ mostly only brings up Windows related results.
Regardless, here’s the audit message:
SELinux is preventing ps from using the perfmon capability.
Plugin: catchall
SELinux denied access requested by ps. It is not expected that this access is
required by ps and this access may signal an intrusion attempt. It is also
possible that the specific version or configuration of the application is
causing it to require additional access.
If you believe that ps should have the perfmon capability by default.
You should report this as a bug.
You can generate a local policy module to allow this access.
Allow this access for now by executing:
# ausearch -c 'ps' --raw | audit2allow -M my-ps
# semodule -X 300 -i my-ps.pp
Checking my journalctl, the denials happen several times in rapid succession (all within the same second), before they stop. After a while, sometimes hours, sometimes minutes, it starts up again, flooding the log.
Happened again, here’s more details on an individual log entry:
SELinux is preventing ps from using the perfmon capability.
***** Plugin catchall (100. confidence) suggests **************************
If you believe that ps should have the perfmon capability by default.
Then you should report this as a bug.
You can generate a local policy module to allow this access.
Do
allow this access for now by executing:
# ausearch -c 'ps' --raw | audit2allow -M my-ps
# semodule -X 300 -i my-ps.pp
Additional Information:
Source Context system_u:system_r:pcp_pmlogger_t:s0
Target Context system_u:system_r:pcp_pmlogger_t:s0
Target Objects Unknown [ capability2 ]
Source ps
Source Path ps
Port <Unknown>
Host peridot
Source RPM Packages
Target RPM Packages
SELinux Policy RPM selinux-policy-targeted-41.44-1.fc42.noarch
Local Policy RPM pcp-selinux-6.3.7-5.fc42.x86_64
Selinux Enabled True
Policy Type targeted
Enforcing Mode Enforcing
Host Name peridot
Platform Linux peridot 6.15.4-200.fc42.x86_64 #1 SMP
PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Fri Jun 27 15:32:46 UTC 2025
x86_64
Alert Count 12814
First Seen 2025-06-26 22:33:31 PDT
Last Seen 2025-07-02 11:25:30 PDT
Local ID c63e6c64-2364-4abe-aa2d-fb947c3e53f8
Raw Audit Messages
type=AVC msg=audit(1751480730.273:2713): avc: denied { perfmon } for pid=462555 comm="ps" capability=38 scontext=system_u:system_r:pcp_pmlogger_t:s0 tcontext=system_u:system_r:pcp_pmlogger_t:s0 tclass=capability2 permissive=0
Hash: ps,pcp_pmlogger_t,pcp_pmlogger_t,capability2,perfmon