decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
compare bit by bit | 297 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
compare bit by bit
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, January 22 2013 @ 09:04 AM EST
Compiler code goes way beyond my knowledge, but if you use different compilers
for the same source (assuming both are legit) wouldn't you get differences
anyway ?

I have an old commercial compiler which compares itself to a competator claiming
to generate smaller and faster code.
Or does that go out the door when switching off all optimisations ?
As in sort of base compilation ?
But then what if you need optimisation ?
Compile unoptim. compiler and then the "payload code" ?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Solution requires bootstrapping it doesn't provide
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, January 22 2013 @ 09:19 AM EST
That doesn't actually solve the problem.

It just says "If you can bootstrap yourself to a trusted compiler, you can
use that to check if you trust your other compiler"

But if you *have* a trusted compiler, just recompile the more efficient one with
it after checking its source code and throw away the one you don't trust!

The problem is how do you get to that trusted compiler in the first place?



The only solutions I can see are: Doing a manual compile of a minimum OS and
compiler, building something to put that on a disc yourself, and using that to
bootstrap everything else; or building something to read data off a disc,
getting a trusted listing of the compiler code with it, and doing a full manual
walkthrough of it.

Note that both of these require you to do the checking in your head, as if you
had any computers/compilers you could trust (Like DDC assumes), you'd be using
them to bootstrap the trust chain instead of worrying about it.


The minimal OS you want to look at for a starting point is probably a Gentoo
stage one install environment or similar.

Gentoo Stage one link: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/faq.xml#stage12

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )