Re: Possible security hole? [was: verify_area(...) possible problem]

Pavel Machek (pavel@bug.ucw.cz)
Tue, 20 Apr 1999 12:43:09 +0200


Hi!

> To name a few random unimportant apps...
> WINE (uses clone() directly)
> StarOffice (uses Linux threads)
> Netscape (uses some form of threading)
> oh yeah. Threading isn't used in anything important.

[these really _are_ unimportant]

> And before you say nobody would use those on a 386 - I do.

I hope you are aware that any of those applications may screw up your
system under load. In case such application does read() into buffer
and unmaps that buffer from other thread, result may be anything - we
are talking about random memory corruption.

I hope you are feeling safe ;-).

Pavel
PS: What is configuration of your system? I'm using 386/40, 8Meg ram,
and was unable to get reasonable performance even from X alone (well,
X started about 1 minute and crashed my hercules in about 2 minutes -
that was unacceptable :-)

-- 
I'm really pavel@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz. 	   Pavel
Look at http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/ ;-).

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