Re: POSIX

[Bas Wijnen]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2005 at 11:30:39AM -0400, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-10-26 at 11:06 +0200, Bas Wijnen wrote:
> > No, not as alternative.  Programs which need a POSIX box to run should still
> > be allowed to use all the cool Hurd features directly.
> 
> This would be very very pleasant. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to
> achieve. The difficulty comes when you allow the insecure subsystem to
> access things like your local files, which you want to protect.

That's what the POSIX box is for.  When the process makes POSIX calls, they
will return as if it has access to a complete filesystem.  But in fact, it
only accesses its own jail.  However, the jail does not prevent the process
from making library/system calls to services which all Hurd processes (also
non-POSIX) can access.  Obviously, they aren't given POSIX style permissions,
but they also aren't given restrictions that other processes don't have.  (And
to be clear, other processes _do_ have the restriction that they can't write
to all your files.)

Thanks,
Bas

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