Inheritance attribute

The inheritance attribute of a class indicates whether processes in the class should be automatically reclassified when one of the classification attributes of the process changes.

When a new process is created with the fork subroutine, it automatically inherits its parent's class, whether or not inheritance is enabled. One exception is when the parent process has a tag, has its inherit tag at fork set to off, and class inheritance is off for the parent's class. In this case, the child process is reclassified according to the classification rules.

When inheritance is not enabled for a class, any process in the class is automatically classified according to the classification rules after calling any service that changes a process attribute that is used in the rule. The most common of these calls is the exec subroutine, but other subroutines that can change classification include setuid, setgid, plock, setpri, and wlm_set_tag. When inheritance is enabled, the process is not subject to reclassification based on the classification rules, and will remain in its current class. Manual assignment has priority over inheritance and can be used to reclassify processes that are in a class with inheritance enabled.

The specified value for the inheritance attribute can be either yes or no. If unspecified, inheritance will not be enabled for a class.

This attribute can be specified at both superclass and subclass level. For a subclass of a given superclass:

• If the inheritance attribute is set to yes at both the superclass and the subclass levels, a child of a process in the subclass will remain in the same subclass.
• If the inheritance attribute is set to yes for the superclass and no (or unspecified) for the subclass, a child of a process in the subclass will remain in the same superclass and will be classified in one of its subclasses according to the assignment rules for the superclass.
• If the inheritance attribute is no (or is unspecified) for the superclass and is set to yes for the subclass, a child of a process in the subclass will be submitted to the automatic assignment rules for the superclasses.
  • If the process is classified by the rules in the same superclass, then it will remain in the subclass (it will not be submitted to the subclass's assignment rules).
  • If the process is classified by the superclass's rules in a different superclass, then the subclass assignment rules of the new superclass are applied to determine the subclass of the new superclass the process will be assigned to.
• If both superclass and subclass inheritance attributes are set to no (or are unspecified), then a child of a process in the subclass will be submitted to the standard automatic assignment.