Design Documents

This is a list of design documents for Native Client. This list generally covers designs that were implemented. It does not cover PPAPI (Pepper).

Dynamic loading and linking:

• Dynamic loading: Options for supporting dynamic loading, and how they interact with dynamic libraries (2010)

Handling faults (hardware exceptions) in untrusted code:

• NaCl untrusted fault handling: guide to the implementation

Sandbox security on Windows:

• Native Client’s NTDLL patch on x86-64 Windows (2012)

Debugging using GDB:

• Providing a GDB debug stub integrated into native_client (2012). This was the main design doc for NaCl’s GDB debug stub.
• Native Client Support for Debugging, Crash Reporting and Hardware Exception Handling – high level design (Jan 2012)
• NaCl: three kinds of crash handling (2012). This is an earlier document. It contains notes on trusted vs. untrusted crash handling, vs. GDB support.

PNaCl:

• Stability of the PNaCl bitcode ABI (2013). This is an overview of ABI stability issues and the features of LLVM IR that PNaCl is removing.
• Incrementally simplifying the PNaCl bitcode format (2013)
• SJLJ EH: C++ exception handling in PNaCl using setjmp()+longjmp() (2013)

Security hardening:

• Hiding PNaCl’s x86-64 sandbox base address (2013). This was part of the security hardening we did for enabling PNaCl on the open web.

MIPS support:

• Design for the NaCl MIPS sandbox (2012)

Cleanup work:

• Removing NaCl’s dependency on Chromium (2012)

DEPS rolls:

• Semi-automated NaCl DEPS rolls: Updates to nacl_revision field in Chromium’s DEPS file (2013). This is a description of current practice rather than a design doc.

Obsolete (not implemented)

PNaCl multi-threading support: The following proposals do not reflect what was implemented in PNaCl in the end. They are listed here for historical reference.

• Multi-threading support for a first release of PNaCl (2013): Proposal for mutex_v2/cond_v2 IRT interfaces.
• Explicit vs. implicit atomicity guarantees in PNaCl (2013): Discussion about how to handle atomic memory operations.