SoC 2012 Ideas

[Charles Davis]

Hi,

Since I graduate this year, this may be the last time I participate--or at least, attempt to participate, since last year didn't quite work out for me :(--in Summer of Code. (I realize I was supposed to email you last week, but what's done is done.) So, without further ado, here's what I'm proposing:

1) Make Wine use App Sandbox on Mac OS X.

A project that used to be listed on the SoC ideas page was to implement proper sandboxing in Wine. Apparently, you think this is unrealistic, because you took it down. (Not the page, just that suggestion.) But, I think that if I narrowed my focus a bit, it could be possible to do this. I'm proposing using the Mac OS App Sandbox API--the beginnings of which were introduced in 10.5 and which came into its own in 10.7--to improve security of Wine on Mac OS. Wine is an excellent candidate for the App Sandbox, because most of its file-system activity is limited to a single directory--namely, the Wine prefix. I'm not sure what you think of this, though, so I'm throwing this out there to get feedback. At the very least, I would like to be able to limit Wine's file-system activity to the prefix.

2) HLSL compiler.

Well, my D3D bytecode backend to LLVM didn't pan out like I'd hoped. Maybe an LLVM-based compiler is too complex for Wine right now. But perhaps we don't need it right now anyway. If CodeWeavers can't afford to pay me, maybe Google can. I can add a simple parser and compiler (that performs little or no optimization) that hopefully would be sufficient for Wine's purposes.

3) Integrate pieces of DCE/RPC into Wine.

As you may or may not know, in Mac OS 10.7, Apple stopped using Samba (probably because it uses the GPL3 as its license) in favor of their own implementation--which just so happens to be based on the original DCE/RPC implementation (the same one that was used as a base for MS RPC). I figured we could cannibalize pieces of it for our own use. Or is that not acceptable?

What do you think? I'm not sure how useful or feasible these are, so I'm posting to the list before.

Chip