Re: Attention PL authors: want to be listed in template table? - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On 8-Sep-05, at 2:18 AM, Thomas Hallgren wrote:


> Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>
>
>
>> Thomas Hallgren wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> Well, yes. But use the word environment in singular please :-) To my
>>> knowledge the security is full-proof with all other VM's since they
>>> all use the standard runtime libraries.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> It's not quite as simple as that.  There are a bunch of VMs and a  
>> bunch of libraries (and a bunch of compilers), and they can be  
>> combined in many permutations.  Not all of them work with PL/Java  
>> at the moment, but we should not hardcode support for just one of  
>> them.
>>
>>
>>
> AFAIK, there are only two flavors of the Java Runtime library out  
> there. The one that Sun provides (and small variants of it, such as  
> the ones that IBM, HP, and BEA) and the "classpath" clean-room  
> implementation. All variants of the former are OK with respect to  
> security and only GCJ has a working environment of the latter. In  
> particular, only GCJ has a functional standards conformant Java  
> Native Interface (JNI) API to the latter and PL/Java is built on JNI.
>
> Should however, someone come up with another Java environment built  
> on "classpath" that has JNI support, then there will be another  
> potential environment for PL/Java. TMK, there's no such environment  
> and none in the making. I have serious doubts that there ever will  
> be. IMO it would be perfectly safe to hard code support for a  
> trusted "java".
>
>
Actually the apache guys are doing another one (Harmony), and there  
is Kaffe. Hardly relevant to the conversation, just added for completion


>
>
>>> The GCJ support is as experimental as the GCJ in itself and  
>>> cannot be trusted in
>>> production.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> You should not say that too loud when someone from Red Hat is  
>> listening. :-)  To my knowledge GCJ is Ready(tm) as of version  
>> 4.0.  And it's being used.  Distributions such as Fedora and  
>> Ubuntu will ship (or do ship?) with everything compiled using GCJ  
>> to the extent possible.  And there are people, in particular at or  
>> near Red Hat, who have been specifically charged for several years  
>> now to make sure that every piece of Java code out there compiles  
>> with GCJ.
>>
>>
>>
> Don't get me wrong. I like GCJ and the idea of compiled Java  
> executables but I try to look at it's potential and usefulness in a  
> realistic way. If Red Hat wants to tout that it's production ready,  
> that's up to them. I'm not a marketing guy.
>
> GCJ currently that has limited security. It is 2 years behind  
> mainstream in versions (they don't have Java 5 yet and their Java  
> 1.4 support is not complete). It is not stable and the performance  
> is nowhere close to the commercial implementations. I think the GCJ  
> team is aware of this and I seriously doubt that it is surprise to  
> the people at Red Hat.
>
> Try using GCJ to run Java applets in a web browser. You can't  
> really since such applets cannot be trusted. I doubt the browser  
> vendors make attempts to prevent it though ;-)
>
>
>
>> Regarding the security issue: Word from Andrew Haley of Red Hat is  
>> that it has simply been too much work to implement security up to  
>> now.  This should not affect the judgement of the quality of GCJ,  
>> it's simply a missing feature.
>>
>>
>>
> Security is some "feature" to "simply miss". Especially if we talk  
> about a VM.
>
>
>
>> Of course, I don't intend to undermine your judgement as the  
>> author about what you consider experimental or not, but you should  
>> expect that if you put your code out there, people will use it in  
>> whatever way they see fit, and in particular with whatever Java  
>> toolchain they see fit.
>>
>>
>>
> I do indeed expect that. But the PostgreSQL community cannot take  
> responsibility for all that may happen when people do that.
>
> PL/Java is designed to run perfectly safe with a JVM that has the  
> correct features implemented. GCJ has serious issues with security  
> and I don't see that PL/Java, nor PostgreSQL should make any  
> attempt to fix them. How safe is PostgreSQL running on an unsafe  
> operating system?
>
> Regards,
> Thomas Hallgren
>
>
>
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