Re: Part 2: System Structure

[Bas Wijnen]

On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 02:32:17PM -0400, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> And my problem with this is that building an OS is a *huge* undertaking,
> and because of this I feel that it is immoral for *me* to entice a large
> group of people to commit effort to something that I feel will not work.

Not long ago I wrote about a system which would allow giving out opaque
memory in a way that can easily be added to the OS after it's built, and we
find that we do need it after all.  In short, the idea is to let the user
session provide access to the space bank through two capabilities, one is
"normal" and gives transparent access (which the user can examine and change),
the other gives opaque access and doesn't let the user read or change it.
Using identify to know that this is a real (TCB) session and asking the
session that this is indeed opaque memory does the rest of the job.

We can build a system without the second type of capability and see if it
works.  If it doesn't, we can add it without much problems.  We don't want to
use it for most things anyway, so we don't need to change the whole system to
suddenly only accept opaque memory.

Thanks,
Bas

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