2.1.0-pre5 posted

Hi,

Today I have posted 2.1.0-pre5. The biggest changes occurred with the 
Trusted Application Framework (TAF). In the last pre-release a new flag 
was introduced "TRUST_RELATIVES". If accepted, all processes related to 
the requesting process would be trusted (including parents). This turned 
out to be *way* too much trusting. As of this new pre-release, only 
children of the requesting process are trusted.

In order to assure that a 2.1.0-pre4 version of the kernel module isn't 
being used and the original trust model accidentally in-place, the new 
version breaks compatibility. The flag is now called "TRUST_CHILDREN" 
and involves sending a different parameter to the kernel. Since this 
feature is still in pre-release, I do not think that this is a problem.

TAF has now been ported to all the other supported platforms.

An important fix for backwards compatibility was also made. The 2.1.x 
series uses a new device protocol that makes it possible for 64-bit 
kernels and 32-bit applications to communicate. The DazukoIO (userland 
library) tries this new protocol first. If the kernel module doesn't 
support it (because it is an older version) then it falls back to the 
2.0.x protocol. And if that fails, it falls back to the 1.x protocol. 
There was a bug that caused the library to fallback from 2.1.x directly 
to 1.x. This has been fixed.

A new versioning scheme has also been introduced. Looking in the new 
"dazuko_version.h" file you can see how the version information is now 
being broken up. The version information is also embedded as static 
strings in the kernel module and userland library. This allows us to 
identify the compiled version in binaries:

$ strings dazuko.ko | grep DazukoVersion=
$ strings example | grep DazukoVersion=

The version information is transferred to the userland application upon 
registration. But there is not yet any function available to retrieve 
this information. I am considering adding a function, dazukoVersion(), 
which will return version information about the userland library and (if 
registered) version information about the kernel module. I think this is 
the best way to go, since it doesn't require anyone to change their 
existing applications.

Other than adding a method for reading the version information (which is 
already being sent over the device) and updating all the documentation 
for using Dazuko, we are about ready for the 2.1.0 official release. 
2.1.0 has turned out to be much more exciting than originally planned. I 
am looking forward to it's final release. 2.1.0 has been in pre-release 
since September 2004.

John Ogness

-- 
Dazuko Maintainer