PSARC Questions Version 1.22
Approved Oct. 2008 (PSARC/2008/625)

The 20 questions outline serves several purposes. One is to present to
the ARC in a uniform manner pertinent information about any case. Many
of the answers to these questions can be direct and specific references
to other case materials (although care must be taken to keep the
references current). A second purpose is to allow an ARC member to get
a concise overview of the case in an efficient manner. Another purpose
is that the 20 questions should provoke thought and questions for
project teams unfamiliar with the ARC process, by asking questions
about aspects of the project that need be considered. Lastly, the 20
questions serves as a vehicle between the case owner and the project
team as an indicator of preparedness. The 20 questions, as do other ARC
materials, remain as documentation of the case plan of record.


1.  What is the proposal being presented for review?

This project is planning to deliver BPF packet capture into Solaris and
the PF_PACKET socket interface. The former is an interface that has been
engineered to provide high performance with packet capture and the
latter provides an easy to use programming interface for raw sockets.

2.  Describe user interactions.

Both of these features are found in other platforms. They bring with
them faimiliarity for developers and users coming to Solaris as well
as basic compatibility at the source code level. Whilst the user is
not expected to directly interact with these interfaces, they will
use them when libraries and applications are updated.

3.  What are the exported (defined by your project) and imported (defined by
    another project that your project then references) interfaces or protocols
    and their respective stability levels?  See:
        http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/policies/interface-taxonomy/ 

The exported and imported interfaces can be found within the other
project documents.

4. Describe any dependencies on hardware (e.g. SPARC exclusive), and on other
   projects within Solaris.

There are no hardware dependencies.

5.  Projects need to be aware of the overall security of the system and how
    their components affect it. Which parts of this project are critical to
    the security of the system to avoid such unintended consequences such
    as unauthorized system entry, unauthorized access to or modification of
    data, elevation of privilege, denial of service, violation of labeled
    security, ...? Does this project require elevated privilege?

Both of the kernel modules being introduced require that applications
hold the net-rawaccess privilege in order to use them.

    A number of specific policies and practices address various aspects of
    the security of the system. They are found in appendix 1. Which of
    these are applicable to this project, and how are they addressed?


6.  Describe means of observing project functionality and performance, by
    an end user or by a system administrator.

kstats are provided by both new modules as a means of exporting global
statistics on their activity. Applications are able to access run-time
statistics via the programming APIs.

7.  How does the project deal with faults and interruptions? Initialization
    and restarting?

8.  How does the project interact with Solaris virtualization technologies
    (xVM, LDOMs, zones, Branded zones, SunCluster, etc.)? 

The requirement for net-rawaccess prevents both kernel modules from
being used within a zone (or branded zone.)

In all other cases, the use of the interfaces introduced by this project
is limited to the network interfaces that can be observed in the global
zone with either the "dladm show-link" command or "ifconfig -a".

9.  Does this project require administration (i.e., configuration or
    management)? If so,

This project introduces new APIs, there are no administration requriements.

    Projects that require or deliver administrative interfaces are often by
    their nature security components of the system and should likely
    address the security question (#5 above, with attention to RBAC and
    Audit). (See also appendix 2).

10. Have you reviewed the Policies and Best Practices? Are there any
    exceptions this project needs? See

    http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/policies/
    http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/bestpractices/