On Wed, 13 Sep 2006, Tom Dunstan wrote:
> > Another possibility would be to test these patches in some kind of virtual
> > machine that gets blown away every X days, so that even if someone did get
> > something malicious in there it wouldn't last long.
Or just have a snapshot which is reverted after each run, and read-only
access to files used to do the build. I know vmware supports this,
probably others too...
> Yeah, nasties could be roughly separated into two categories: stuff which
> affects your box, or stuff which uses your box to affect someone else. A VM
> fixes the first, and a firewall blocking outgoing connections (with exceptions
> for the CVS server and patch buildfarm or whatever it is server) largely fixes
> the second.
>
> I was under the impression that most VM products are x86 centric, which
> wouldn't lead to huge amounts of diversity in the buildfarm results. At least,
> not as far as architecture goes.
I have played with QEmu (www.qemu.org) which is open source and supports
multiple target architectures. I'm not sure how stable all of the
different targets are, I know that sparc64 is not quite done yet.
--
The problem with engineers is that they tend to cheat in order to get
results.
The problem with mathematicians is that they tend to work on toy
problems in order to get results.
The problem with program verifiers is that they tend to cheat at toy
problems in order to get results.