Reusable Memory Manager

From: xerofoify@gmail.com (nick)
To: kernelnewbies@lists.kernelnewbies.org
Subject: Reusable Memory Manager
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2015 22:42:38 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <55385C1E.109@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAK7rcp-eNq6sutpy1aBh+9UULEgi2xRFSkjQs1TQ4SgkM7dGcw@mail.gmail.com>


On 2015-04-22 10:39 PM, Kenneth Adam Miller wrote:
> So, I have a particular use case that has a lot to do with security.
> 
> Basically, we have a intended secure kernel version with grsecurity and
> other patches on it, and we have a specific application that has to do data
> filtering as an inline reference monitor.
> 
> The problem is, there is throughput and design considerations that are
> limiting efficiency in the sense that it is highly difficult to make the
> system concurrent and also highly difficult to scale-all while also being
> secure.
> 
> Basically, the memory regions have to be encoded at compile time because of
> the way kernel segregation works. This makes the security proof of the
> system far more simple and manageable; it's easy to say that no userland
> monitor which is being given access to a specific memory region can access
> outside of the region to which it is allocated, because it's statically
> set. The tradeoff here is pretty severe, because the static settings that
> have to be adopted pretty much mean that each particular monitor is given a
> specific memory region; if there's a lot of traffic to a specific monitor
> type, then that one type will be overwhelmed, but not even at the rate that
> the machine itself could support. This is because all the other cores are
> potentially sitting unused while the one in this worst case scenario is
> running out of memory and not able to dispatch work to more cores.
> 
> So my ultimate question is: is there some reusable, dynamic memory
> allocation manager that can be used? I'm thinking that there has to, at the
> least, be the constructs by which user land processes are managed and
> divvied memory by the kernel itself. Does anybody know where that source
> would be? Where I can go in order to learn more about that?
> 
> What we want is a secure way to dynamically allocate memory from these
> static memory page boundaries such that
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Kernelnewbies mailing list
> Kernelnewbies at kernelnewbies.org
> http://lists.kernelnewbies.org/mailman/listinfo/kernelnewbies
> 
You didn't finish your email such that ... . I would be glad to try and 
help if you finish off what your requirements are.
Nick