Hello,
I hope you don't mind me spamming the list with my problems.
I have a question about the association of capabilities with process-local meta data. As far as I understand, the "badging" of capabilities is the recommended mechanism for servers to attach a server-local meaningful value to a capability. After having handed out the capability to a client, it gets this value reported each time the client (or any other process to which the capability was delegated to) invokes the capability or delegates the capability back to the server (e.g., as RPC argument).
Now, I have the following scenario: There are three processes, a factory (F), a mediator (M), and a client (C). The factory is responsible for physically allocating objects (e.g., in Genode's case, one example would be the core process that hands out dataspaces). The mediator is a process that sits in-between the client and the factory (in the Genode world, this could the the init process). It keeps records about the allocation and may use this information to implement a policy. The client is the designated user of the object. To create an object, C will call M, which, in turn, will call F on behalf of C:
alloc create F <-------- M <--------- C
F will create the actual object and a corresponding badged capability and returns the badged capability as return value to M. Because M wants to keep records about the lifetime and parameters of the created objects, it needs to associate a process-local meta-data structure to the capability.
badged cap F ---------> M C : (meta data <-> cap)
M stores the meta data in a process-local data base using the cap as key. It then hands out the cap to the actual client. Sometime later, the client decides to destroy the object (or perform another operation at M that takes the cap as argument):
badged cap F M ---------> C | | uses object (e.g., invoking the cap) destroy | (cap arg) | ? <----------+
When M receives the destroy request with the cap of the to-be-destroyed object as argument, it wants to look up the corresponding meta data from its data base. But unfortunately, the cap argument of the destroy function got assigned a new local name within M (some number within the receive window of M).
How can M find the meta data associated with the allocated object?
Best regards Norman