Re: Detecting Illegitimate OS X Installations?
Re: Detecting Illegitimate OS X Installations?
- Subject: Re: Detecting Illegitimate OS X Installations?
- From: email@hidden
- Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2006 16:22:08 +1000
One good technique for detecting illegitimate OS X installs could
be to check what kind of CPU is being used. Apple has not yet
released any Intel Macs which use anything except a Core Solo or
Core Duo chip, so any OS X install that's running on a Pentium 4 or
an AMD chip is definitely a hacked version. The easiest way to
check the CPU type, in turn, would be to use the CPUID instruction.
Just a note on CPUID, there was a thread a while back on the darwin-
x86 list (http://lists.apple.com/archives/darwin-x86/2006/Jan/
msg00002.html). One of the caveats of using CPUID is, as noted by
Eric Albert:
"Calling CPUID is challenging, since it trashes ëx. gcc uses ëx
as the PIC base and doesn't handle the case where you tell it in your
asm constraints that you're trashing ëx. So the only way to use
CPUID is to save ëx, call CPUID, and restore ëx."
The recommendation from that thread (and others like it) is that you
shouldn't really ever be calling CPUID yourself. For example, you
can get most of the same info using sysctl, which has the advantage
also of being platform agnostic.
Wade Tregaskis
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