Kernel mods and RTIngres

[Eric Bergan]

> >  The ``Ingres lock device'' is a hack that dates back to at least PWB/Unix
> > and maybe before.  There is enough interprocess communication available
> > now that it shouldn't be necessary.
> 
> 	In fact, it dates to V6. However, the obvious question is
> which version of IPC should they use? Currently Sys V ipc is not
> compatible with BSD ipc, which is not compatible with Version 7
> ipc (the happily gone mpx files), etc.
>  RTI has to support their system on a multitude of systems.

	Not only that, RTI offers Ingres under VMS, and on IBM mainframes.
A consistent lock interface would be important in trying to bring out
new versions in a timely manner on all the different machines. And we are
talking about installing a driver here, not some change to the file system,
or to the scheduler. If security is the concern, I would point out that
the Ingres backend runs suid to "ingres", and all the databases are owned
by this user, so you are relying on the trustworthiness of the backend
protection code to keep users from reading potentially sensitive database
information.

	I installed Ingres in the Pentagon for the Department of the Army,
to be used by several thousand users, and no one there complained about
any possible breaches (it was not, however, handling DOD classified
material). As Thompson said in his Turing address - you can only completely
trust software when you have written all of it yourself - including operating
system, compilers, linkers, applications, etc.

-- 

					eric
					...!seismo!umcp-cs!aplvax!osiris!eric