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Sure but I don’t see any compelling use cases to motivate opening it up. Do you have an example of one? Even if the kernel opens it up without a compelling use
by manyworlds 7y ago
Sure but I don’t see any compelling use cases to motivate opening it up. Do you have an example of one?
Even if the kernel opens it up without a compelling use case, it seems likely that distribution policy will keep it default locked to root.
Which is my point here. I don’t see a compelling reason to have a JIT in the kernel when AOT BPF seems to cover 90% of all existing use cases. In fact I may even write a bpf to kernel module compiler myself.
- monocasa 7y ago* Syscall tracing, sandboxing, and monitoring * KVM device MMIO emulation * OS personality emulation (like WSL but doesn't require root) * New synchronization primitives to user space (like XOK's wake predicates) * A lot of others.. Modern BPF is the exploring the same cornerstones as exokernels and really opens up a whole bunch of concepts that haven't been seen in mainstream kernels, particularly if non privileged users are allowed to invoke it.
- manyworlds 7y agoThanks for the examples but those all still seem like things vast majority of Linux users can do today, since vast majority of Linux users have root access. Both desktop and server. Mobile users like android don’t have root but I don’t see why an untrusted mobile app would need bpf. Only benefit of allowing non-root that I can see is enabling untrusted containers in cloud environments to do the same. All large cloud providers use KVM/zen (not containers) for untrusted users in which case they already have root. Can you give an example of a scenario where the user doesn’t have root yet still would want to do those things?