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Subject: Re: memory protection

Author: Scott Gasch

Date: 11:57:11 01/10/02

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Hi David,

>Sure, but he was asking if one (user-level, I assume) program can corrupt the
>memory of another such program. And it can't if an OS uses the protection
>facilities of the processor, which Windows does.

This is correct.  The only way that applications have access to each other's
address space is if they create and map a shared section of memory for
interprocess communications.

> That being said, the kernel
>design of Windows is different from that of Linux in some respects, as you point
>out. That makes the Windows kernel more vulnerable in some ways.

The design of the windows kernel is different than the design of linux, true.
But what about the NT design makes it more vulnerable?  I know a lot about the
design of NT and can't think of a vulnerability.  I don't know much about the
design of UNIX though.

>Linux are vulnerable in other aspects. In practice, I experience at least at
>many crashes in Linux as I do in Windows. I like both OS'es for different
>reasons, but Linux certainly isn't more stable thatn Windows 2000, in my
>experience, whether I run user level programs, or server software.
>
>What version of NT? 3.x and 4.0 are crap. Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) is at least as
>stable as Linux in my experience. And I run a _lot_ of software, both userlevel>and server software, on both.

Server software is usermode too.  The only thing in kernel mode under NT is the
kernel and the drivers.  I think, as I said in the last post, that the stability
of linux and windows are determined 99.9% by the quality of the drivers you are
running on the machine.  I've seen tens of thousands of NT crashes (I work in NT
kernel test and its my job to crash the kernel).  There are bugs in NT -- but
they are rare.  What is much more common is bugs in some video drivers, camera
drivers, antivirus software, etc.

Scott



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