Filesystem-oriented flags: sad, messy and not going away

Posted Mar 17, 2020 7:41 UTC (Tue) by areilly (subscriber, #87829)
In reply to: Filesystem-oriented flags: sad, messy and not going away by josh
Parent article: Filesystem-oriented flags: sad, messy and not going away

I'm afraid that I don't know. I had always assumed that it was a specially-blessed user-space library provided by the filesystem. I'm sure there are readers who know more about Solaris than I do (it wouldn't be hard).

Filesystem-oriented flags: sad, messy and not going away

Posted Mar 18, 2020 21:37 UTC (Wed) by justincormack (subscriber, #70439) [Link]

Yes it was just a normal library - you could make syscalls elsewhere but they were neither documented or stable.

OpenBSD has been taking this model to a more modern design, where libc is blessed, and only it can make syscalls, by having a special attribute set. This is designed as a security measure, to stop arbitrary code using syscalls.