On Sat, Jun 15, 2002 at 13:35:57 -0400, der Mouse wrote:

> Hmm.  If you boot Sun's code, does it bring up a real OS, or just
> something X-terminal-ish?  I'm thinking that if it's a real OS and
> supports any way of getting user code into the kernel (LKMs and such),
> its security could probably broken that way.

The code it runs is even "thinner" than X-terminal-ish.  Search google
for something like "SunRay SLIM protocol".  Few first hits will be a
usenix paper and a thesis by the guy who worked on the project.
Something like VNC, but much less resource hungry.  All processing is
on the server.  E.g. as I understand it, when you play an mp3 file,
the decoding is done on the server and decoded audio stream is sent
over network in the form suitable to be fed directly to audio device.
[The guy who pushed me to write audiocs@ebus was quite worried about
bunch of engineers listening music on their rays, i.e. with a bunch of
simultaneous mp3 decoding processes on the server and so he wanted to
use krups for jukeboxes].  Screen updates are done with a simple
API-neutral protocol that operates at the level of raw pixels (e.g. no
draw line or draw text requests).


> Is its RAM socketed?  In principle, you could pop that out and plug in
> dual-ported RAM, and do surgery on stuff on the fly that way.

8 megs soldered.  The usenix paper claims they only use 2 megs.


SY, Uwe
-- 
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