Strange securelevel

Norbert Koch NKoch at demig.de
Fri Jul 22 08:01:48 GMT 2005


> Hi,
>
> after playing a bit with "securelevel" i found a very strange one (well, i
> thought there will be just -1, 0, 1, 2 and 3). But look at this:
>
> #sysctl kern.securelevel
> kern.securelevel: 2147483647
>
> Thats the highest securelevel i found on my FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE.
> So, whatr does it mean? Getting electro shocks when touching the mouse
> and/or keyboard?
> And, the man page ha to be rewritten, to explain the rest of the
> 2147483644
> securelevel.
>
> No, serious, is this a bug, or what?

Well, that's 0x7FFFFFFF.
That means a little less than 2^31 securelevels to document.
And I'm expecting this to be about 2^63 for 64 bit systems ;-)

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand
sysctl_kern_securelvl() in kern_mib.c, it does not disallow
setting the securelevel so high. It only disallows to lower it.

Norbert



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