Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 10 Nov 2013 17:24:35 +0100 | Subject | Re: Partially Privileged Applications | From | Shahbaz Youssefi <> |
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Not sure if I understood you (or you understood me). We don't throw away anything. Only difference would be instead of generating a trap to call a function in the kernel, we can just call it and have the hardware take care of privileges. The "trap way" is the one that actually seems hacky! A hack proposed to fix the brain-dead processors of twenty years ago.
As a bonus you would also have more control over what parts of a driver actually get run in privileged mode.
Care to explain why you would call this a step backwards?
On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 5:18 PM, Richard Weinberger <richard.weinberger@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 4:03 PM, Shahbaz Youssefi <shabbyx@gmail.com> wrote: >> Dear all, >> >> First, please CC replies to myself. Second, this is an RFC. >> >> I've been tampering with an idea for some time now and I've done some >> research. Finally, I wrote it down here (a terrible place as it turned >> out): >> >> http://shahbaz-youssefi.blogspot.it/2013/11/partially-privileged-applications.html >> >> and would like to know what you think. This idea requires an >> improvement to the CPU architectures to allow unifying kernel and user >> spaces and perform privileged instructions based on the location of >> the instruction rather than a manually switched mode (or via traps). >> >> Please, do take a look at the link. I'm far from a kernel expert so >> the idea may not be as rainbows and unicorns as it seems to me right >> now. But it also may be. In that case, probably we need a push by >> well-known people (i.e., Linus) to get the manufacturers to implement >> the feature. >> >> At least from a developer's point of view, with this idea you could >> gdb or even valgrind check the drivers in the very least with much >> less chance of a kernel oops. How faster can you imagine debugging a >> kernel module? > > So, we throw away 20 years of OS development and go back to hacky call > gates? ;-) > >> Thanks, >> An unfortunate soul who has to deal with buggy kernel modules >> -- >> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in >> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org >> More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html >> Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ > > > > -- > Thanks, > //richard
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