Re: GRUB2 Build on Mac OS X

[Peter Jones]

On Fri, 2005-12-09 at 16:49 -0600, Hollis Blanchard wrote:
> On Thursday 08 December 2005 10:27, Peter Jones wrote:
> >
> > That being said, what's the reasoning for using this uncommon and
> > lossely defined extension in the first place?  The way GRUB (both 2 and
> > Legacy) uses nested functions, it's no better than just having a method
> > vector, and certainly not easier to read.
> 
> I do find nested functions very easy to read...
> 
> What do you mean by "method vector"?

Something along the lines of linux's "struct file_operations".

> > Would you be amicable to patches which
> > change code from using nested functions to a more C-like implementation?
> > (I don't mean like the patch in my current GRUB Legacy package;
> > something cleaner than that hacky approach.)
> 
> Do you have any specific ideas? I'm very interested, but I honestly don't 
> know 
> how it could be done (other than the method you described of creating custom 
> structs and passing pointers to those).

Why other than that?  It works very cleanly in a great many programs...

> > > Enable the executable stack using:
> > > 1) Set some bit in the ELF file so the OS knows we want this
> > >   (that's what linux does).
> > > 2) Enable it using some function.
> > > 3) Creating our own stack.
> >
> > There's a major point of contention being ignored here.  OS vendors
> > don't want to ship executables which require an executable stack.  Full
> > stop.
> 
> Would be alright if we could enable execute permission only on the specific 
> pages needed (as known by GCC)? GCC provides an ENABLE_EXECUTE_STACK macro, 
> but it seems that is not currently used on Linux. It is used on the various 
> BSDs.

It would be functional, but again we'd have security concerns.

Sure, we're maybe being a little paranoid, but "they" really are out to
get us, and being paranoid has worked very well for us so far.

-- 
  Peter