Capsicum merge in progress (was: Re: Capsicum -- 9.x merge in sight)

On Sat, 22 Jan 2011, Robert Watson wrote:

> Jon and my current plan is to merge, over the next few months, various 
> kernel features required to support Capscium sandboxing for FreeBSD 9.0: 
> first capability mode support (this week), then capabilities themselves 
> (which are a form of file descriptor in Capsicum), followed by process 
> descriptors (a file descriptor alternative to process IDs that may be used 
> by supporting applications).  The current plan is *not* to merge 
> libcapsicum, a userspace library used by certain applications to construct 
> sandboxes, as we feel the API remains insufficiently mature at this point. 
> However, the Capsicum system calls can still be used directly by 
> applications, including Chromium. We would distribute libcapsicum as a 
> package alongside 9.0, just not as a supported OS API for the time being.

FYI:

Jon and I have now started the merge; I committed basic kernel capability mode 
support yesterday (cap_enter(2), cap_getmode(2), new errno values, 
capabilities.conf).  Over the next few weeks we'll merge man pages, additional 
kernel support for capability mode and capabilities, including delegated file 
system subtrees in capability mode, cap_new(2) and friends, process 
descriptors, and so on.  Kernel support for these features will remain 
conditional on compiling in options CAPABILITIES (and later options PROCDESC) 
for the time being.

Robert