Re: I would like to help.

[bcarver2@austin.ibm.com]

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Howard,

The patch file is attached for PowerPC.  As the README says,
I am the author and I am releasing this under the GPL with
no warranties or guarantees of any kind!

First, the disclaimer: this stuff builds and runs in warning mode
on the machine I used to port it (an IBM 44P-270 server with
1.5 GB of RAM). I have not tested it extensively, however, so
there are no guarantees it will work for anyone else.  I don't have
time to do extensive testing at the present time.

The port went smoothly once SuSE released their 7.1 for PowerPC
about 10 days ago. That release uses the 2.4.2 kernel, so I didn't have
to deal with huge differences.  There were several times when the
build broke and I was able to pull in a fix from the SuSE tree and
fix it quickly.

There is one place in arch/ppc/kernel/process.c where
do_execve_secure() is called with some register parameters and
I had to just guess that it would work to use the next register.  I
left some comments in there (see BC:) because I thought for
sure that it would crash there.  Maybe it's not called in warning
mode?

Most of the changes were very straightforward.  Basically, I just
looked in the i386 architecture specific parts of the tree for
CONFIG_FLASK and made corresponding changes on the
ppc side.  The rest of the changes were identified when the
build broke.

I had a little trouble getting the utilities to build top-down, but
I was able to build each directory manually without many problems
(vixie-cron was the only utility I had to modify, I believe).

Howard Holm wrote:

> I would suggest sending the patches to this list (a tarred gziped
> attachment should work). That will ensure everyone has the ability to
> review them and perhaps use them as a base for other work.  We'll see
> them here as well and see what we can do about including them in a future
> release.  Of course, it makes life easier for everyone if you make
> sure that the code and your mail message makes clear that you are the
> author and that you're releasing your changes under the GPL.
>
> I would personally be interested in hearing about your experience
> porting, (i.e., what you had to change and any problems you had) since
> you're the first person I'm aware of to port selinux to another
> architecture.  I'm sure other potential porters on the list might also
> be interested.
>
> --
> Howard Holm <hdholm@epoch.ncsc.mil>
> Information Assurance Research Office
> National Security Agency

--
Bob Carver

``Being politically correct means always having to say you're sorry.''
--Charles Osgood



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