Monday, September 04, 2006

Are we there yet?

Things have been slowly moving forward on the development front. I submitted a generic hooking infrastructure to NetBSD core for a decision as to whether or not it should be committed to the tree. A decision is still pending on that. What I have done is a direct port of the FreeBSD eventhandler stuff but there is a general dislike about the large macro needed to work some of the magic. We shall see what happens.

On the veriexec front, I updated my kernel sources and re-merged my per-page veriexec changes with the changes made by Elad when he added the fileassoc facility. I extended the fileassoc facility to allow a "hint" to be used instead of the implicit VOP_GETATTR() that the fileassoc code was using since in the per page code there were places where trying to get the file attributes was the wrong thing to do and I also could use the fileassoc facility as a generic hash table so I could do the vnode pointer <=> veriexec entry mapping. This change was not liked by some because it was seen I was trying to stealth the fileid back into the interface. It was more a lack of choice. At the time, using filehandles (VOP_VPTOFH()) was not an option because the NFS client code was lacking support for the VOP_VPTOFH() call. This would have meant a major regression as I would not be able to support NFS - very bad. After a bit of a thrash around with another developer (yamt) the problem with NFS was raised and yamt kindly offered to make good this hole in the filehandle support. This support was added over the weekend. While I was waiting I converted fileassoc to use filehandles and re-factored the per-page modifications to also use filehandles. The per-page veriexec patch is getting smaller and smaller which is good. I will give the fileassoc code a final once-over and then commit it. At this point I should be ready to re-spin the per-page veriexec code and finally get it into the source tree - that day will be a great day for me.

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