Re: OS decisions

On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 6:58 PM, Brian Makin<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Well, if you don't have some protection between a user and the base system
> then any user would be able to do nasty things to other people on the
> system.
>
> Grab their passwords, kill their processes, intercept their network traff=
ic
> etc...
>
> Genera for example was single user only. =A0On top of that it didn't even=
 try
> to protect the user from themselves. =A0If you overwrote the scheduler wi=
th
> minesweeper... so be it.

But how do you define kernel and user space? If I get "access" to the
scheduler and make a tweak so it calls a special function I just
wrote, how would that function be tagged as being crucial to the
system? Would you be able to have a process-wait-function if you
seperated "kernel" and "user" spaces?

> You could make a multiuser system without that sort of protection but the=
n a
> hostile (or careless) user could cause havoc.

I don't think anyone is questioning that. I'm trying to imagine how it
would work. How would you seperate all the objects floating around in
memory?