Hi Craig :)
WOW! Talk about a great "Fred White" Answer!!! Complete and humorous
at the same time!
Ok... So, now you make remember the caution they told us at "US
Mines" in Basic Training "Your Level of Competence IS your Safety"
(this was told as they handed us our first *LIVE* Claymore Mine... Ahhh
that has to be my favorite toy!
Thanks,
Art
Art Bahrs, CISSP
Security Engineer
Providence Health & Services
[log in to unmask]
Phone: 503-216-2722
-----Original Message-----
From: Fairchild, Craig D [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, July 14, 2008 10:32 AM
To: Bahrs, Art; [log in to unmask]
Subject: RE: Cannot Purge PRIV mode File Problem
Art asks:
> Without any side or inferred references ... Weren't the AIF routines
> designed after HP started down the POSIX route? I seem to remember a
> lot of things coming out of HP that were very much of a *nix flavour
> rather than pure MPE flavor back in the MPE 5 and 6 eras...
..
No, the Architicted Interface Facility (AIF) product was first delivered
well before the MPE/iX 4.5 developer release that introduced POSIX APIs.
The purpose of AIFs was to provide a high performing, privileged
interface to OS routines and data structures that highly skilled
application and tools vendors could use to perform their privileged OS
interactions in an organized (or architected) manner. The idea was that
unlike the "wild west" of MPE V, access to internal routines and data
structures should be provided in a manner that helped insulate vendors
from internal OS changes that happen from release to release.
By their nature and their design, AIF routines include the smallest
possible amount of overhead in order to minimize the penalty for using
them rather than directly attempting to access system internals. This
means no, or at least very, very little, paramter checking. Because of
this, using AIFs requires privileged mode execution. Whenever you enter
privileged mode, you are taking responsibility for the integrity of the
system. The exact same thing is true of the DEBUG facility. A user with
PM capability can go into DEBUG and slam whatever values they want into
whatever memory or disk locations they want. But unless you are an
extremely competent MPE/iX expert that is usually not a very good idea.
AIFs are an MPE/iX unique invention and have no influence from any other
system or API standard.
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