Solving the process ID allocation problem

Solving the process ID allocation problem

Posted Sep 29, 2002 17:40 UTC (Sun) by GreyWizard (subscriber, #1026)
In reply to: Solving the process ID allocation problem by oneukum
Parent article: Solving the process ID allocation problem

The kernel cannot for reasons of security, accept a pointer into kernel memory which user spaces feeds it.

Well, sure. But that's not what was suggested. Just because a valid process identifier is identical to the memory address of a process struct doesn't mean the kernel can't look it up values passed in from user space in a hash table before acting on them. The code that creates processes would cast the pointer and the rest of the system would remain unchanged.

(I agree this makes a PID hard to type, especially on 64 bit systems, but things like job control and terminal cut-and-paste mitigate this somewhat.)

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