Re: What is a capability?

Bill Frantz <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.capabilities.general
Message-ID <r422Ps-1075i-8CC8706D78FF4837B16F305F1C444036@Williams-MacBook-Pro.local>
On 1/8/15 at 4:53 PM, kpreid-M/[email protected] (Kevin Reid) wrote:

>KeyKOS is not an object-capability system because the way you 
>interact with a capability varies depending on the type of the 
>capability. For example, if my understanding is correct, 
>capabilities to memory pages are never interacted with by 
>sending messages to them, but rather by inserting them in page tables.

You can call a page key and get a read-only page key. We 
considered implementing a fetch/store operation, but there was 
never a compelling use case for it.


>Start keys are more ocap-ish, since they are implemented by 
>application code, but (I am assuming) there is no expectation 
>of any commonality of protocol or a notion of "selector" 
>between different start keys.

The 32 bit order code is almost always used as a method selector.

The 8 bit "data byte" is sometimes used as a facit ID, but most 
often was ignored. It could be used to reduce the domain 
(object) count in a system by 256, but that's a hacky optimization.

Cheers - Bill

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