Wine kernel acceleration module?

[Francois Gouget]

On Sat, 18 Jan 2003, Gavriel State wrote:
[...]
> A kernel module may also have some benefits from the security
> perspective.

I am not sure a kernel module would be inherently better from a security
point of vue: after all, the same module would handle all the users on
the system. So there would be more risk that a user gains access to data
he should not have access to. On the other hand it may also make it
possible to implement CreateProcessAsUser&co... not that they are used
much though.

Anyway, when compared to the shared memory server it seems to me that
the main advantage of a kernel module is stability. It is my
understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) that with the shared memory
approach, a buggy (or malicious) Wine/Winelib application could crash
all other Wine/Winelib applications using that server (at least only one
user would be affected). That seems like a significant drawback.

In either case though, to me it seems the two biggest obstacles are
maintenance and compatibility:
 * if either approach requires duplicating (too much of) the server
code, then the big question is whether there will be enough people
interested for that alternate implementation to be maintained.
 * there are still signifcant changes in the server code. In my
understanding there are still a number of things that are currently
managed on a per-process basis and that should be managed by the server
instead. Being able to easily switch from one implementation to another
seems important to me. But this kind of compatibility requires that they
remain in sync... that sort of brings us back to maintenance.


-- 
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
        War doesn't determine who's right.  War determines who's left.