Why world needs openscap_parser?

[isimluk]

Hello guys,

Congratulation to the new gem! I noticed that functionality currently in the repo can be replicated by exiting openscap gem.

There must be some reasons why to start new project. So, I was curious if you have any write up about design deficiencies of existing solution or bug reports or other kind of data. If you can share any of your findings I would be more than happy to learn from those.

Thanks!

[xprazak2]

Hi,
you are right, there is a lot of overlap with openscap gem. While using it in a long-running process, there was an excessive memory consumption, which eventually lead to the crash of the whole process. The exact cause is still unclear, the issue was resolved by calling any method from openscap gem in a shellout, which is far from a perfect solution.

The memory issue was also encountered by compliance-backend, but the same workaround could not be applied in a containerized environment, @dLobatog will have more details about that.

[redhatrises]

Some statements that have been made:

- multiple segfaults
- much of the data attributes are not possible to obtain
- multiple memory leaks which are especially problematic in a containerized environment (Openshift)
- due to the issues above, we were failing performance testing which was a hard requirement for Cloud Services for RHEL Compliance to launch at summit.