"The kernel contains syscall emulation functionality that is not
used in Mac OS X. Insufficient validation of an input parameter
list could result in a heap overflow and a local denial of service
through a kernel panic. The issue is addressed by removing the
syscall emulation functionality."
I'm not entirely sure how I missed that! I possibly focussed too much
on Darwin/XNU rather than Mac OS X, though. Lesson learned for the
future, I think.
Glancing at the Darwin sources confirm that the syscall emulation
code was removed between 10.3.8 and 10.3.9.
That's a bit of a shame, really. Strikes me somewhat as akin to
amputating an arm because a little finger's been broken, but then
ours is not to reason why. If it was removed as late on as that,
though, it does raise the possibility of a (fixed) patchset against
XNU -current based on the code from Panther, but there's probably not
a lot of mileage in that—unless running Linux binaries on Mac OS X
suddenly becomes the next big thing (mind you, current Oracle or DB2
on Mac OS X would be very interesting—but user-space syscall
emulation would have too much of a performance hit for it to work in
production).
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