Linux equivalent for VirtualProtectEx? - linux

I am doing some simple JITing, and use VirtualProtectEx under Windows to mark pages as executable.
What would be the equivalent of that under Linux, and preferably, other POSIX/Unix-like OSes too?

You are looking for mprotect and probably also mmap. Note that, unlike with Windows, there is no way for process A to change process B's memory map (short of horrible tricks with ptrace).

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Linux Wildcard (*) is implemented on User Space or Kernel Space?

I've researched so far that Wildcards in Linux were a binary located in /etc/glob, or in C functions called glob(). Nowadays it's native in any Unix-based system, but, it's confusing to understand where it runs, when we type something like:
mv * folder
ls *
Is it running in user space or kernel space?
This is the context
Is Kernel space used when Kernel is executing on the behalf of the user program i.e.
System Call? Or is it the address space for all the Kernel threads (for example
scheduler)?
Yes and yes.
They will I presume use glob(3), a system call, to accomplish this. System calls take place in kernel space. Also glob(3) will make other system calls such as opendir(), also running in kernel space.
This is done at the shell level in the example you give, e.g. bash, tcsh, etc. They will I presume use glob(3), a C library function, to accomplish this. This is strictly user-space.
There isn't such syscall glob. The wildcard feature in bash is provided by the glob() function, which runs in the user space. Credits for #Vercingatorix
To see a list of syscalls, run man syscalls.
This new reply is for calling out that the accepted answer is wrong and can mislead readers.

How to link kernel functions to user-space program?

I have a user-space program (Capstone). I would like to use it in FreeBSD kernel. I believe most of them have the same function name, semantics and arguments (in FreeBSD, the kernel printf is also named printf). First I built it as libcapstone.a library, and link my program with it. Since the include files are different between Linux user-space and FreeBSD kernel, the library cannot find symbols like sprintf, memset and vsnprintf. How could I make these symbols (from FreeBSD kernel) visible to libcapstone.a?
If directly including header files like <sys/systm.h> in Linux user-space source code, the errors would be like undefined type u_int or u_char, even if I add -D_BSD_SOURCE to CFLAGS.
Additionally, any other better ways to do this?
You also need ; take a look at kernel man pages, eg "man 9 printf". They list required includes at the top.
Note, however, that you're trying to do something really hard. Some basic functions (eg printf) might be there; others differ completely (eg malloc(9)), and most POSIX APIs are simply not there. You won't be able to use open(2), socket(2), or fork(2).

How can i prevent gdb from attaching to an exe?

I'd like to prevent would-be hackers from attaching to my binary on Linux systems. I see that ptrace DENY_ATTACH can be used on OSX. Is there such option that can be used on linux? How about on Windows?
Thanks for any info!
Such a system call requires kernel support. Even if it existed in Linux, it would be fairly easy to disable by compiling your own kernel.
In linux, ptrace returns -1 if the process is being ptraced.
So, one solution would be, inside your program, try to attach to your process, and if you get a -1, you will know that the program is being ptraced.

How can I find file system concurrency issues?

I have an application running on Linux, and I find myself wanting windows (!).
The problem is that every 1000 times or so I run into concurrency problems that are consistent with concurrent reading/writing of files. I am fairly sure that this behavior would be prohibited by file locking under Windows, but I don't have any sufficiently fast windows box to check.
There is simply too much file access (too much data) to expect strace to work reliably - the sheer volume of output is likely to change the problem too. It also happens on different files every time. Ideally I would like to change/reconfigure the linux file system to be more restrictive (as in fail-fast) wrt concurrent access.
Are there any tools/settings I can use to achieve this ?
Hmmm. Concurrent access to files is perfectly legitimate on Posix-like systems so there is no kind of "failure" mode associated with it. Is there a reason you can't use file-locking on Linux? It's difficult to tell from your description what the actual problem is (1000 times of what?) but it sounds like the traditional flock() or lockf() system calls might be what you're looking for.
For some reason I thought you were using C++. The following applies if you are.
If you are using multi-threading and fstream IO and custom streambufs or you disabled sync_with_stdio, then yes, the C++ iostreams will act differently from iostreams on Windows.
I ran into this with one of my own projects.
Windows defines a mutex in its iostream sentry. Linux does not. Linux does seem to have locking in its C stdio functions, so usually that works out anyway.
However, I defined a custom debug streambuf that didn't go through stdio and got all sorts of corruption in Linux.
I got around it by using a mutex that is preprocessed out if the OS is Windows.

Linking 32-bit library to 64-bit program

I have a 32-bit .so binary-only library and I have to generate 64-bit program that uses it.
Is there a way to wrap or convert it, so it can be used with 64-bit program?
No. You can't directly link to 32bit code inside of a 64bit program.
The best option is to compile a 32bit (standalone) program that can run on your 64bit platform (using ia32), and then use a form of inter-process communication to communicate to it from your 64bit program.
For an example of using IPC to run 32-bit plugins from 64-bit code, look at the open source NSPluginWrapper.
It is possible, but not without some serious magic behind the scenes and you will not like the answer. Either emulate a 32 bit CPU (no I am not kidding) or switch the main process back to 32 bit. Emulating may be slow though.
This is a proof of concept of the technique.
Then keep a table of every memory access to and from the 32 bit library and keep them in sync. It is very hard to get to a theoretical completeness, but something workable should be pretty easy, but very tedious.
In most cases, I believe two processes and then IPC between the two may actually be easiest, as suggested othwerwise.

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