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So I believe I'm correct in saying that this is what Microsoft effectively does with WSL and Joyent does with Triton, i.e. faking a Linux kernel syscall table o

• twotwotwo 8y ago
  WSL does some interesting stuff, including some new code running in kernel mode (there's more here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/06/08/wsl-system-calls/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/06/08/wsl-system-c...). No idea about Triton. gVisor is a user-space process providing a restricted Linux interface on top of regular-old Linux via syscall interception provided by ptrace. They all certainly demonstrate decoupling the "personality" presented to app code from the original interface of the kernel. I'm trying to say something a little different, which is that lots of things conventionally thought of as OS design issues are not inherently about syscalls and ring 0, and can be (and are) worked on in userspace. Like, you can have capability-based interaction between mutually untrusted bits of memory-safe code (the model of this OS) inside a Unix or Windows process, and you can do a lot of other exploration of how to organize/format/communicate in userland. The kernel interface provides necessary tools but it's not all there is. Of course kernel-side improvement is still important; foundations matter. Just, thinking big does not only have to mean replacing or even tweaking the kernel.