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l4linux26 @ fiasco-ux w/ dietlibc
by Marko Wolf 02 Nov '05

02 Nov '05

Hi! I tried running l4linux26 on fiasco-ux compiled from the actual CVS with the dietlibc using the following script: fiasco -t 32768 \ -G800x600@16 \ -m 512 \ -R roottask \ -l names \ -l log \ -l dm_phys \ -l simple_ts -t 380 \ -l fuxfprov -n9 \ -l rtc-ux -n10 \ -l l4exec \ -l l4dope-ux \ -l "loader run l4linux26.cfg" Unfortunatly, l4linux causes a null pointer exceptions (see attached log). I tried various kernel compiler options with always the same error. Any idea for the reason or what I can try else? Thanks a lot Marko PS: By the way, Im using gcc 3.3.6

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fiasco for ARM
by Shakthi Kannan 31 Oct '05

31 Oct '05

Greetings! Couple of questions: 1. Will we be getting an announcement in the mailing list when fiasco moves with uclibc and dietlibc without oskit support? 2. What is the current status of fiasco for ARM (cores 9 and above)? The FAQ mentions only about x86 with i486 and above, but, I found some ARM relevant code in l4sys/include-x2/L4API-l4x2/l4/arm. Is there anyone working with fiasco for ARM? Thanks, SK -- Shakthi Kannan, MS Software Engineer, Specsoft (Hexaware Technologies) [E]: shakthimaan(a)yahoo.com [M]: (91) 98407-87007 [W]: http://www.shakthimaan.com [L]: Chennai, India __________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com

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L4Linux without Con or DoPe?
by Marcel Selhorst 28 Oct '05

28 Oct '05

Hi Hackers, is there a way to use L4Linux without Con or Dope? In detail, I want to boot L4Linux and give a Linux-framebuffer (not the l4fb!) the control of the videocard, so that the console has direct hw-access. Best regards, Marcel Selhorst

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bootstrap + module
by Christoph Mueller 27 Oct '05

27 Oct '05

Hello, I am reusing some code from dde_linux/examples/sound. But I use bootstrap instead of rmgr. Where do I find correct syntax for menu.lst to specify an additional module (sample.pcm) for my server? The syntax from dde_linux/examples/sound/menu.lst uses RMGR. I think, I have to give a parameter to bootstrap that I can access the additional module in my server. syntax from example: >title sounddrv-foo > kernel (nd)/tftpboot/USER/rmgr -sigma0 task modname "sounddrv-foo" module > module (nd)/tftpboot/USER/fiasco -nowait -nokdb >... what i tried: >title l4snd - l4env >kernel $(P)/bootstrap -sigma0 task modname "l4snd" module >modaddr 0x01500000 >module $(P)/fiasco $(FIASCOARGS) >module $(P)/sigma0 >module $(P)/roottask >module $(P)/names -verbose 2 >module $(P)/log >module $(P)/dm_phys >module $(P)/l4io --noirq >module $(P)/l4snd >modaddr 0x01000000 >module $(P)/snd.pcm sample1 l4env_multiboot_info->mods_count is zero. (I assume no module was assigned to my server.) Thanks, Christoph

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Re: Capability Authentication
by Marcus Völp 21 Oct '05

21 Oct '05

Hi, this is a reply to an email I found in the l4-hurd mail archive [http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/l4-hurd/2005-10/msg00020.html] I'm not on the list, sorry. On Fri, 2005-10-07 at 23:01 -0400, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote: >/ > > And, do we need the second one / >/ > > to be provided by idl4? I say, usually the server will not trust its / >/ > > client and this it's useless, as the server will not use the new handle./ >/ / >/ You are making an incorrect assumption. In general, what you say is/ >/ true, but if the server can authenticate the validity of a capability,/ >/ there is no reason not to use it./ ... The more general solution comes from something we call a "constructor". A "foo constructor" is a server that knows how to create new copies of the "foo" program. Every constructor inserts a unique, unforgeable, and undisclosable capability into the process structure of the process that it creates. This capability is called the "brand". Each constructor uses a different brand from all other constructors. In EROS, there is a kernel capability that performs (approximately) the following operation: interface ProcessTool extends key { bool identify(entry_cap_t someProc, cap_t brand); } Given an entry capability to a process and a second capability, the kernel checks whether the second capability is equal to the existing brand in the process. If so, it returns true, else it returns false. By construction, only constructors hold ProcessTool capabilities. However, if you hold a capability to a foo constructor, and you also hold an entry capability, you can turn to the foo constructor and ask "is this an entry capability to some process that you created?" That is: is it an entry capability to an authentic instance of "foo"? This authentication pattern is enormously important for many of the security arrangements that we are able to achieve in EROS. One of my largest concerns about L4sec is that the L4sec team does not (yet) see that this operation is important. Without an operation like this, it is impossible (or at least, we do not see how) to build robust third-party trust contracts. Jonathan, yes so far L4.Sec does not support such an operation. We thought about (I think Bernard Kauer and Marcus Brinkmann already had a discussion on this topic on l4-hackers) adding a compare operation on endpoints which allows you to match identity of two endpoint capability (compare permissions provided). So far we are not sure whether such an operation is really needed or whether you want to construct systems the way you do. The fundamental issue is that a potentially trusted capability is handed to a server by a not completely trusted source (the client C). We thought briefly about two general solutions to this problem: 1) obtain a version of this capability from a trusted source, or, 2) prepare and defend against potential misbehavior of the invoked server. ad 1: This solution assumes a network of trusted "name"-servers and protocols that require the client C in order to share a capability with some other process S that it establishes this sharing with the target of the capability (D). C can do so by giving its name to S to D and asking D to share the rights S can then request a capability to D from its trusted nameservers and ask for the shared capability provided it trusts D. Please keep in mind that we did not build such a system yet and that it is only a preliminary and potentially not working solution. ad 2: Alternatively the server can prepare to defend against misbehavior of D. In L4.Sec the receiver of an IPC controls the location where an incoming message is placed. Thus it can select an area of its address space so that even if D replies with bogus content, S is not harmed. It remains, however, the problem of blocking S. An easy way to defend against blocking attacks is to fork of a thread for this particular client's request and let it invoke the pot. untrusted capability on behalf of the client. Other thread invoking the same server are not affected by this blocking. Again please keep in mind that both are preliminary solutions. We have still to construct a system on top of L4.Sec. Also please note that L4.Sec is not a fixed API but has experimental status and that we welcome both suggestions for improvement and requirements. However, you will find that features will be added only if they cannot be implemented on top of L4.Sec with a reasonable effort. This is one of the fundamental rules which in my opinion contributed to the success of L4. So please apologize my stubbornness in this point. Compare might be such a feature which will get added if we find no way to achieve what Jonathan listed in his mail. Best regards Marcus Völp -- Marcus Völp TU-Dresden Department of Computer Science Institute for System Architecture Tel: +49 (351) 463-38350 Fax: +49 (351) 463-38284

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Module arguments
by Marcel Selhorst 20 Oct '05

20 Oct '05

Hello L4-Hackers, I have a problem regarding the loading of modules: If I want to load a module and put the regarding entry into the menu.lst including parameters for the module, the module cannot be found in the memory. For example, I have the entry: module (nd)/hddencrypter --with-password-dialog or module (nd)/ramdisk --with-password-dialog (the --with-password-dialog is an argument, which forces GRUB to prompt for a password and afterwards replaces the --with-password-dialog with a new parameter --password='xxx'. This is needed for the harddisc encrypter in order to get the password for decrypting the configuration file). But whenever I put a parameter behind a module, the loader isn't able to locate the entry inside the memory (probably because it compares the whole string?). l4lx | l4env_rd_path: ramdisk l4lx | Loading: ramdisk bmodfs | [B.2] generic_fprov/examples/bmodfs/dm.c:135:dm_open(): bmodfs | Error: Object 'ramdisk' not found! l4lx | Couldn't load RAM disk from fprov! Are there any ideas on how to solve this? Best regards, Marcel Selhorst

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L4.Sec Preliminary Microkernel Reference Manual
by Bernhard Kauer 19 Oct '05

19 Oct '05

The operating system's group at Technische Universit?t Dresden is pleased to announce the first draft of the L4.Sec Preliminary Microkernel Reference Manual. The document can be found at http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/L4/L4.Sec/ L4.Sec is a specification of a next generation microkernel interface targeted to co-host user-level servers implementing security-critical functionality next to untrusted and potentially malicious software. Bernhard Kauer

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RE: Sawmill's dataspaces and the Hurd's physmem
by yuan Darwin-r62832 19 Oct '05

19 Oct '05

Hi Neal, Thanks for your detailed information. > Physical memory management needn't be an all or nothing deal. Certainly, an application might wish to completely > manage the paging policy and its address space layout, however, I tend to think that this is the exception. And as > we will provide a POSIX personality, we need to have some sort of default VM manager. About general VM manager, what I really mean is just the "default VM manager". However, the question is still there: now that those sort of default VM managers provide mmap to those applications who don't want to manage their phsical memory, should they trust these VM managers? If yes, these applications who use the Sawmill's framework should also trust DSMs, now that DSMs provide mapping to them, and DSMs will manage their own physical memory(implement their own replacement policy, they can even just use the library(LRU) provided by Hurd). So, we can divide the applications into 2 categories: some of them wanna manage their physical memory, others won't. For the applications who do intend to do that, they just apply memory directly from Hurd's physmem server which is trustworthy; For others, they can just use the Sawmill's framework. Note that these DSMs also apply memory from Hurd's physmem, instead of Sawmill physmem DSM. So we can just think these DSMs are just the applications who intend to manager their own physical memory. My conclusion is, if Sawmill's framework has security problem on trust model, so has Hurd. So we have to assume that an application must trust its pager ( or pagers in Sawmill's model). Base on this assumption, Hurd & Sawmill's approach can live together. > I see a number of problems with SawMill's dataspaces. The root of this thread is the presentation of a potential security flaw > in the design of dataspaces. (Whether this is important or not depends on the assumed trust model and security goals.) > Another is that as far as I can tell paging decisions are made towards the root of a dataspace hierarchy and not at the applications themselves. As I said above, for those applications who don't want to manage their own physical memory, they don't need to make paging decision. For others, they just apply memory from Hurd's physmem server, and manage the memory by themselves, which means they can make the paging decision by themselves. Correct me if I have any misunderstanding. Thanks. Darwin

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RE: Sawmill's dataspaces and the Hurd's physmem
by yuan Darwin-r62832 19 Oct '05

19 Oct '05

Hi Neal, By reading the document of Hurd(VMM), I guess I had a misunderstanding about Hurd's approach. Sorry for bothering. Best Regards, Darwin -----Original Message----- From: Neal H. Walfield [mailto:neal@walfield.org] Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 9:40 PM To: yuan Darwin-r62832 Cc: l4-hackers(a)os.inf.tu-dresden.de; l4-hurd(a)gnu.org Subject: Re: Sawmill's dataspaces and the Hurd's physmem At Tue, 18 Oct 2005 19:42:27 +0800, yuan Darwin-r62832 wrote: > I think these 2 approachs are not incompatible. Here are the reasons, > > 1. In Hurd's approach, every application could manage its own > physical memory. However, for most of application developers, they > don't want to take care of the VM replacement policy. To solve this > problem, Hurd has to provide a general VM server to be the pager of > this kind of applications. However, as the philosophy of Hurd, should > this applications trust this server? Physical memory management needn't be an all or nothing deal. Certainly, an application might wish to completely manage the paging policy and its address space layout, however, I tend to think that this is the exception. And as we will provide a POSIX personality, we need to have some sort of default VM manager. The solution that I've opted for is a library based one: a default memory management library will, for instance, implement an LRU based eviction scheme and require no application input. For many applications this will be appropriate and sufficient. Those applications wishing to take complete control will also be able to completely replace the library. I think that some applications can provide useful hints in relatively concise ways. A document viewer, for instance xpdf, might want to cache previously rendered pages. It does not make sense to send these to swap if rereading the data and rerendering is cheaper. In this case, the application can attach a function to drain the cache to a library provided hook which is called when there is memory pressure. I think that this small type of change may offer dramatic results. Moreover, if the change is highly isolated (which in this case seems feasible), it will be easily accepted upstream. An even less invasive hint would be to set some environment variables. Clearly we wouldn't expect most users to set these but an application's packager could based on observed behavior. In the case of e.g. grep or cat we might want to set the read ahead parameter to "very aggressive". If a developper so desires, a more aggressive, but more invasive approach, can also be adopted. Instead of using malloc and free, the application can use a slab allocator. I think this can only be effectively done if the slab allocator participates in the eviction scheme. Again, this is possible in our case with a number of library provided hooks but not for user applications running on a traditional Unix-like core. This can be made backwards compatible by having the configure script check for the required mechanisms and if they are not available then to redefine slab_alloc and slab_free to malloc and free. > 2. In Sawmill's DS approach, every task(AS) has a specific thread > named "region mapper" to be the pager of other threads. It captures > the page fault, then decide to forward it to corresponding server, and > get mapped. So from the higher level point of view, these servers are > the pagers of the task. If Hurd application should trust that general > VM pager, the applications using Sawmill's DS framework should trust > these servers as well. I hope it is now clear that there is no general VM server. > 3. Relative to Sawmill's approach, Hurd provides a clear & great > physical memory server, which makes the whole physical memory of > platform could be fairly used by all of the servers & applications. > > Therefore, we can use Hurd's physmem server as the central > controller. Sawmill's DSMs apply physical memory from it. The > applications who wanna use Sawmill's approach could still walk on > their own way. For some applications who wanna manage their own > physical memory, they can apply memory from physmem server directly. I see a number of problems with SawMill's dataspaces. The root of this thread is the presentation of a potential security flaw in the design of dataspaces. (Whether this is important or not depends on the assumed trust model and security goals.) Another is that as far as I can tell paging decisions are made towards the root of a dataspace hierarchy and not at the applications themselves. Hopefully it is clear why I've choosen to reject this scheme. Thanks, Neal

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RE: Sawmill's dataspaces and the Hurd's physmem
by yuan Darwin-r62832 18 Oct '05

18 Oct '05

Hi Neal, I think these 2 approachs are not incompatible. Here are the reasons, 1. In Hurd's approach, every application could manage its own physical memory. However, for most of application developers, they don't want to take care of the VM replacement policy. To solve this problem, Hurd has to provide a general VM server to be the pager of this kind of applications. However, as the philosophy of Hurd, should this applications trust this server? 2. In Sawmill's DS approach, every task(AS) has a specific thread named "region mapper" to be the pager of other threads. It captures the page fault, then decide to forward it to corresponding server, and get mapped. So from the higher level point of view, these servers are the pagers of the task. If Hurd application should trust that general VM pager, the applications using Sawmill's DS framework should trust these servers as well. 3. Relative to Sawmill's approach, Hurd provides a clear & great physical memory server, which makes the whole physical memory of platform could be fairly used by all of the servers & applications. Therefore, we can use Hurd's physmem server as the central controller. Sawmill's DSMs apply physical memory from it. The applications who wanna use Sawmill's approach could still walk on their own way. For some applications who wanna manage their own physical memory, they can apply memory from physmem server directly. [ physmem ] / \ |_ _| [ DSM ] [Hurd app] (manage physmem by itself] / \ |_ _| [Sawmill app] [Sawmill app] Best Regards, Darwin

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