Starting service with mysqld_safe_helper fails in SELINUX "enforcing" mode

service mysql start bails out with weird error message from the new mysqld_safe_helper binary when having log-error option set in either [mysqld] or [mysqld_safe] section of my.cnf. Whether log-error is used with an explicit file name argument or not doesn't matter. Also when not having log-error in the config file at all mysqld_safe_helper is still throwing an error, but in this case the service startup script reports SUCCESS instead of ERROR

The error message is

# service mysql start

Starting MySQL.161228 12:32:33 mysqld_safe Logging to '/var/lib/mysql/localhost.localdomain.err'.

161228 12:32:33 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /var/lib/mysql

/usr/bin/mysqld_safe_helper: Can't create/write to file '
' (Errcode: -597589344)

(Jira does not show this, but the actual file name shown in the error message is the unicode placeholder character for code point U+0001, and not just an empty string)

The actual error code varies and is usually a large positive or negative value, but not a valid error code.

When looking at strace output the parameters passed to mysqld_safe_helper look fine:

execve("/usr/bin/mysqld_safe_helper", ["/usr/bin/mysqld_safe_helper", "mysql", "log", "/var/lib/mysql/localhost.localdomain.err"], ["TERM=xterm", "PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/bin", "PWD=/usr", "SHLVL=2", "MYSQL_HOME=/usr", "_=/usr/bin/mysqld_safe_helper"]) = 0

Also when running mysqld_safe_helper with the same arguments manually it works as expected without throwing an error at all:

/usr/bin/mysqld_safe_helper mysql log /var/lib/mysql/localhost.localdomain.err

Also when passing in an invalid file name a correct error message is displayed (^A here was entered using CTRL-V CTRL-A, so it is really 0x01

/usr/bin/mysqld_safe_helper mysql log ^A

/usr/bin/mysqld_safe_helper: Can't create/write to file '
' (Errcode: 13)

(again the file name in the actual error message is the U+0001 unicode placeholder, and not just an empty string)