On 2014-11-17, at 08:05, Tom Marchant wrote:

> On Fri, 14 Nov 2014 18:31:23 -0500, Farley, Peter x23353 wrote:
> 
>> I have often thought it was a mistaken design by IBM that prohibits 
>> non-authorized programmers from exploiting multiple address spaces 
>> and instruction-level space-switching facilities.
> 
> How would you propose that such non-authorized programs access only 
> the other address spaces that they were permitted to access? In other 
> words, how would you protect the integrity of all address spaces if 
> unauthorized code were able to access other address spaces?
>  
fork() allows programmers to exploit multiple address spaces.  It
requires no elevated privileges.  I presume it protects integrity.

[Restored from trimmage]:
>>  ... Or for that matter, the machine-level I/O facilities.
>>  
I believe that was much the design of original S/360 I/O, with
user-written channel programs prefixed by the OS to ensure
security.  This led to Byzantine code to support byte-spinning
and dynamically modified channel programs.  To the extent that
it's gone, good riddance.

-- gil

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