Palladium: A System for Supporting Safe User Extensions Using Segmentation Hardware

of the Thesis Palladium: A System for Supporting Safe User Extensions Using Segmentation Hardware by Ganesh R. Venkitachalam Master of Science in Computer Science State University of New York at Stony Brook 1999 User Extensions extend the functionality of an existing user-level application by providing additional services to users that were not available in the original application. Typically, the services are rendered in a way that is transparent to the application being extended. Physically, an extension may run as a separate process independent of the application, or as a shared library loaded into the address space of the application. The separate-process model incurs severe performance overheads, whereas the shared library model leaves the application memory open for corruption by the extension. The previous approaches to this problem have tried to reduce Inter Process Communication overhead or provide protection within an address space using software methods. This thesis descri..