On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 05:01:28PM +0100, Lodewijk andré de la porte wrote:
2014-10-30 16:21 GMT+01:00 Tomasz Rola <rtomek@ceti.pl>:
Also, I myself would not use L4. No bad feelings about it but, sounds a bit too huge for this task, meybe? Since I don't know too much about all this stuff, I guess I'd start with C or Forth on bare metal. I had not enough time to make sure I could develop for it using Linux/BSD, since other OSes are no-no.
For me the reason for a kernel is existing drivers and a proven infrastructure. You want to make the protocol and data as non-native as possible, change it around as much as you can, to remove potential exploits. There's just too many exploits though :(... No way to protect against an exploited PDF, unless you want to reformat the PDF's (maybe into JPG?). You could theoretically do that on the fly with L4, but with bare-metal you'd be hurting yourself a lot.
Oh I see. Using L4 makes sense then. But, if concern goes as far as files prepared with hostile intent, I again mused myself once (what a muser I am) with idea of filtering this stuff through software/converter running on non-386 emulator, like PDP-10 (simh or something, running TOPS-* is optional), vax (again simh, some modern bsd should fit) or even S/380 (modified Hercules emulator, modern variation on S360 mainframe, hobby project, gnu software ported to MVS/380 which itself descends from one commercial mainframe os, which at one point of time became public domain - if memory serves, of course). Since those are all musings and no hard work, I cannot claim any kind of success or if this makes any sense or not at all. Seems doable, requires time and reading some old manuals written on typewriter and scanned, and the font is ugly and scales poorly on 6'' ebook reader... -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola@bigfoot.com **