[Openmcl-devel] process-run-function and mach ports usage

Daniel Weinreb dlw at itasoftware.com
Thu Feb 24 07:36:56 PST 2011


I have a friend trying to sell software that uses static
analysis to detect bugs. It's for Ada, which is often
used for mission-critical software, and for Java.
(It's called SofCheck, by Tucker Taft, one of the world's
experts in highly-optimizing compilers.)

His main problem selling it is that potential
customers simply don't care about bugs!  They say
"Oh, if there's a bug that matters, then some
user will report it and we'll fix it."  I was
amazed by this; if his tool worked for Common Lisp
I would love it and I think my team would happily
embrace it.

The weak part of all such tools is that there
are always false positives and false negatives.
You can read about the "findbugs" tool and
how they have dealt with this.  SofCheck is
a far more powerful tool than findbugs but
in the same genre.

Some of his competitors sell similar technology,
billing it as a security product rather than
a bug product.  My friend has ethical qualms
about this; he's not so sure that it's fair to
describe the software that way, as compared
to software that has been explicitly designed
to find the usual sources of security holes
such as buffer overflows and SQL injection
and so on.

-- Dan

Robert P. Goldman wrote:
> Not only that, but if you are slow to market, your company dies.
>
> I was peripherally involved with some people trying to do high reliability os development for avionics, and as far as I can tell no one wants to pay what this kind of software engineering really costs. Not even in industries that are safety critical.
>
> On Feb 23, 2011, at 23:56, Ron Garret <ron at flownet.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> The problem is that the market for operating systems is very different than the market for bridges.  Notwithstanding the odd comp.risks horror story, in general when an OS leaks resources people may be inconvenienced, but they don't die.
>>
>> On Feb 23, 2011, at 9:02 PM, Shannon Spires wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> Wow. This little exchange was a mind-blower. My jaw is hanging open. My naive, childish illusions of software competence have been dashed.
>>>
>>> If bridges were built with this level of professionalism, people would die and engineers would be jailed.
>>>
>>> I've heard that "the difference between a Porsche and a Ferrari is that the Porsche was designed by people who went to college." All this time, I had sort of assumed
>>> Porsche:Ferrari :: Apple:Microsoft.
>>>
>>> Guess not. 
>>>
>>> It's time somebody wrote an operating system with the same degree of engineering rigor that Germans use to design cars. Are we yet tired enough of this kind of crap to do something about it?
>>>
>>>
>>> [Gary wrote:]
>>>
>>>       
>>>> Apple's documentation for mach_thread_self() (see
>>>>
>>>> <http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-1456.1.26/osfmk/man/mach_thread_self.html?txt>)
>>>>
>>>> doesn't seem to explicitly state that that function increments the
>>>> port's send reference count (though it certainly seems to.)  The GNU
>>>> Hurd documentation does state this, but warns the user that
>>>> mach_thread_self() allows the reference count to silently wrap around
>>>> (wrap around 2^32 ?  what ?) without error and that the reference count
>>>> shouldn't be decremented if this overrun might have happened.
>>>>
>>>> This stuff escaped from a lab somewhere; the fact that it's been
>>>> lurching around the countryside frightening villagers as long as it
>>>> has is pretty sad.
>>>>
>>>> I don't care what a thread's Mach port's send right's reference count
>>>> is.  I do care that thread creation doesn't leak kernel resources, and
>>>> because if this nonsense it does.
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> [then mikel evins wrote:]
>>>
>>>       
>>>> However, during the investigation, we ended up talking over the issues with Avie Tevanian, who was the boss of that stuff at NeXT at that time, and who was before that involved in the design and construction of Mach at CMU. What struck me about the conversations was that Avie said Mach was designed to leak certain resources because allowing them to leak avoided some costly houskeeping, and in "normal use" the leaks would not be a problem. Mach's designers simply assumed that systems would be rebooted often enough to prevent any issues arising.
>>>>
>>>> I remember that he seemed slightly put out that NeXT customers would use system calls in a way that violated that assumption.
>>>>         
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>       
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