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Re: Power Management et. al.



On Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 02:09:27PM +0200, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> 
> MOL emulates a virtual machine. So MacOS code cannot access anything
> outside of this emulated environement. The only security risk I can
> see is around the fake "drivers" used to communicate between MOL and
> MacOS. I don't know if they are fully safe against things like buffer
> overflow attacks or such. Also, make sure not to export to MacOS
> disk partitions with critical informations ;)

thats actually something i find quite annoying with mol, you cannot
have per user disk images/partitions.  for a multiuser environment it
would be more useful to have a master readonly image with macos on it,
mol could pretend its read-write (since macos barfs when it encounters
anything resembling file permisions or security). when macos is
shutdown all changes just go into /dev/null, similar to how MacOS
netbooting works.  then each user can have a small 20 - 40MB HFS image
in thier home directory which is mounted in mol, read-write.  OS9's
phony mulituser thing could probably be convinced to put the user's
home directory on the mounted read-write image, maybe if you tricked
macos into thinking it was being netbooted.

one could also use afpd instead of a disk image file i suppose, though
alot of macos software gets pissed at afpd volumes.  

per user images would also be nice for people with obscenely large
disks, each user could have thier own image with its own copy of
macos.  vmware works like this.  (though vmware has an interesting
system where the disk image is no larger then the ammount of data it
holds, it grows as you add data, until you hit the preconfigured
limit).  

-- 
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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