site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com Hi Alexei, Many thanks for the pointer (no pun intended). Mo. -- mo mcroberts :: mo@nevali.net :: http://nevali.net _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... A Google search for "Mac OS X system call emulation" leads to http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301327 ("About the security content of the Mac OS X 10.3.9 Update"): "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). This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com