site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com <http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/> Please email me the bug number so that I can keep an eye on it. S+E -- Quinn "The Eskimo!" <http://www.apple.com/developer/> Apple Developer Technical Support * Networking, Communications, Hardware _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-kernel mailing list (Darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-kernel/site_archiver%40lists.a... At 16:28 -0700 8/11/04, Matt Jaffa wrote: I thought that setting the flag to CTLFLAG_ANYBODY would allow anyone to be able to set this structure no matter if it is a root app or regular user app. You'd think so, wouldn't you? Alas, it doesn't work, for reasons I'll explain below. Is it because I am branching off of _kern that it will only allow a root app to set my structure. This is the problem. The implementation of sysctl (__sysctl in "xnu/bsd/kern/kern_sysctl.c") has a special-case test for non-super user attempts to set variables in "kern", "hw", "vm", and "vfs", and bounces them with an EPERM error. *sigh* This special case doesn't apply if you hang off other roots. When I changed my test to attached to "net", everything worked fine. I'd be tempted to call this a bug, but I'm not 100% certain because the implementation of sysctl is /way/ complex and there may be side effects that I don't understand. Nevertheless, I'd appreciate it if you could file a bug report, to give kernel engineering the opportunity to make the final decision. And if is this way, must I branch off of something else like _user to allow me to modify it with a non-root app. I have tried to tie my structure to the _user branch, but it doesn't register it with _user so that when I do sysctlbyname it returns ENOENT = 2. "user" is designed for variables that are implemented entirely within user space. The System framework implementation of sysctl captures "user" requests and implements them internally; it never passes them to the kernel. This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com