Re: Rosetta and Code Injection
Re: Rosetta and Code Injection
- Subject: Re: Rosetta and Code Injection
- From: Bob Murphy <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:59:25 -0700
So how does one distinguish the Rosetta process from the PPC
surrogate?
You don't.
Let me put this pretty bluntly... how would you like to be the poor
engineer catching bug reports because Joe Blows thread that he ran
in your address space happened to overwrite something critical
because Joe Blow made a mistake in his code? How much worse would
this be if someone were giving out cookbooks to people who
otherwise were beginning coders?
I know how hazardous this is. Even worse than causing crashes, it
could be a security hole a mile wide.
Frankly, I wasn't expecting to get answers from Apple engineers, or
much of any real discussion on the list. I just posted here because I
thought maybe some third party developers who knew about code
injection might hang out on this list, and email me privately.
Shipping commercial and open-source apps have been using code
injection and the underlying kernel routines for years. I'm just
trying to fix one of those apps so it works with Rosetta. If there
were another, safer way to accomplish this, I'd happily use it.
However...
1. Apple has a security model that prevents arbitrary apps from doing
code injection. So it's safer than it could be, and the user gets
some warning when they have to type in a supervisor password to get
the app to work.
2. As a professional Mac developer since 1985, I've been that "poor
engineer catching bug reports" many, many times. The last thing I
want to do is write buggy injection code that causes any poor
engineer grief - whether it's myself or someone else.
3. The app I'm working on is well-established, and its users are
quick to report any crashes or odd behaviors.
Now ask yourself again why this is unsupported...
Oh, I already knew! :-) I sit on your side of the fence in my other
life, working on a Linux-based cell phone platform. So I get to tell
people why they can't do things like render directly to the hardware
frame buffer (the X server owns it exclusively), no matter how
important the frame rate in their game is.
- Bob
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