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https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-33/product_id-47/opmemc-1/Linux-Linux-Kernel.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_i

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-33/product_id-47/opmemc-1/Linux-Linux-Kernel.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-33/p...

nineteen999 6y ago
Sure, there have been plenty of CVE's for the Linux kernel, and will continue to be. Now show us the list of replacement kernels written in Rust, Ada, Lisp, or whatever that are: 1) free software (or open source as a second best) 2) as widely distributed and as portable as Linux 3) supports as much hardware as Linux 4) supports the wide range of applications that Linux does 5) free of memory safety related CVE's as well There is always a series of tradeoffs - Linux has adopted a classic but unsafe programming language as its basis which has in turn allowed it to cover an enormous amount of ground in a (relatively) short time frame, support massive amounts of new employment and accelerate the development of the web. It is not clear that an alternative design or implementation in another (safer) language would have moved the world as far forward as Linux has in the same time frame, or whether its even possible, as nobody has demonstrated this.
- adrianN 6y ago
  That Linux has won is probably more due to lucky historical circumstances than to technical superiority.
  - nineteen999 6y ago
    It's not apparent that Linux has won anything, the race is still open. Where are the real contenders is my question? Apparently they are still stuck at the starting line, discussing endlessly how perfect their system will be when they finally choose the right language to implement it in.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      Making an OS takes a lot of manpower. Linux absorbs most of the programmer hours, the BSDs take almost all of the rest. What is left over for projects like Redox is a tiny team of developers. You can't expect a ton of hardware support to come out of those efforts.
      - nineteen999 6y ago
        Linux and the BSD's grew to support x86/Sparc/POWER/Alpha/ARM/68K hardware in a time when hardware drivers mostly had to be reverse engineered from scratch or donated from companies that wanted support for their hardware mainlined into the kernel. As a result, anyone working on Redox, Fuschia, or whatever popular contender now have a massive library of driver source code to refer to when working in their languages of choice. This is not a resource that the Linux and 386BSD communities had when starting out. Rust isn't as standardized or at critical mass yet, as C was when Linux was launched. The language still lacks comparative mindshare, no matter how popular it is here on HN. That's why there aren't enough developers.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  Nobody said that Linux was bad, just that it's not secure.
  - nineteen999 6y ago
    I didn't say that Linux wasn't bad, or that it was secure, I asked you to point to a current replacement that is in a better position, which you've declined to do.
    - aidenn0 6y ago
      If Linux is bad and insecure, what was the point of your comment?
      - nineteen999 6y ago
        > I asked you to point to a current replacement that is in a better position, which you've declined to do. I never said "Linux is bad and insecure" either, and when making blanket assertions like that, it's helpful to have a point of reference. So I ask again, which free software, widely deployed, battle tested and highly secure operating system are you comparing Linux to? That was the very obvious point of my comment, which you have apparently missed (ignored?) twice now.
        aidenn0 6y ago
        I mean you could have asked "what operating system that starts with an L out there are you comparing Linux to," so you picked those specific features for a reason. I would like to know why.
        nineteen999 6y ago
        > you picked those specific features for a reason. I would like to know why. I think this is a good question, and I was wondering if someone would ask that. To be more specific, I think points (1), (3) and (4) are of primary importance, so I would address those specifically: 1) commercial, proprietary and expensive systems were very fragmented and incompatible with each other, especially UNIX, and VMS, Windows etc. Nobody seems to want to go back to that. I think this is the biggest hurdle for any new commercial system to overcome, otherwise Linux (or other, better free systems) will continue to dominate until a better replacement comes along. Look what happened to Solaris. Better than Linux in some respects, worse in some, but it failed to retain its market share. Windows is not hugely used as a server platform either like it was in the early 2000's outside the infrastructure required to support Active Directory, Exchange and Sharepoint. 3) obviously popular server hardware needs to be supported by the system, eg. HP, Cisco UCS, DELL etc. This should be evident by the amount of effort that vendors like Redhat put into patching their kernel to ensure compatibility with hardware from major server vendors. If the proposed alternatives don't support these hardware platforms then they are going to find it hard to gain traction. 4) you aren't going to migrate people away en-masse from a C-based system like Linux without being able to support the major languages and ecosystems that rely on C and/or C++ for their runtimes. People will still need to run their Tomcat applications, Ruby on Rails, Python, NodeJS etc. all of which currently depend on C or C++ to some extent. I think at least Redox is addressing this somewhat with their "relibc" implementation, which would allow "legacy" C codebases to be hosted there in the future, but let's be pragmatic and admit that it's probably a long way off. As somebody who builds/manages emergency services communications platform based on Linux that supports over 70,000 front line emergency services workers, who in turn provide criticial services to over 6 million people, those are the reasons why I see no currently viable platform worth migrating to in the short to medium term _for our particular application_. In addition to self-hosted environments like ours, Linux currently also has a very particular grip within cloud hosted environments as well (which aren't particularly relevant to me at this point in time). In order for non-C based platforms to take off, you either need to support the C runtimes, or be prepared to wait a long time as other languages that don't depend on a C runtime become popular and the ecosystem grows enough.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Free beer has nothing to do with moving the world, and rest assured that Linux will fade away when everyone involved with its creation is gone. It is already starting with MIT/BSD/Apache OSes for IoT.
  - nineteen999 6y ago
    May or not eventually be true, but your response as per usual wholly misses the point and is irrelevant.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      And as usual some people get up on their nerves and feel like answering irrelevant comments instead of moving on.
      - nineteen999 6y ago
        I'm not the slightest bit unnerved by your comment. But if you feel like answering the original question I posed then I'm all ears. Even if I indulge your fantasy for a moment - Linux (amongst other systems) has provided myself and many others with a solid career for the better part of the last 25 years, daily security patches from vendors and all, and I don't see any solid evidence of that changing before I retire. Further I suggest most Linux people would be able to adapt if the world were to move on to an improved competitor with enough momentum to be adopted en masse - which hasn't happened.
        pjmlp 6y ago
        That has nothing to do with its technical capabilities, rather a free beer UNIX clone, that is all.

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-33/product_id-47/opmemc-1/Linux-Linux-Kernel.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-33/p...

nineteen999 6y ago

Sure, there have been plenty of CVE's for the Linux kernel, and will continue to be. Now show us the list of replacement kernels written in Rust, Ada, Lisp, or whatever that are: 1) free software (or open source as a second best) 2) as widely distributed and as portable as Linux 3) supports as much hardware as Linux 4) supports the wide range of applications that Linux does 5) free of memory safety related CVE's as well There is always a series of tradeoffs - Linux has adopted a classic but unsafe programming language as its basis which has in turn allowed it to cover an enormous amount of ground in a (relatively) short time frame, support massive amounts of new employment and accelerate the development of the web. It is not clear that an alternative design or implementation in another (safer) language would have moved the world as far forward as Linux has in the same time frame, or whether its even possible, as nobody has demonstrated this.

adrianN 6y ago
That Linux has won is probably more due to lucky historical circumstances than to technical superiority.
- nineteen999 6y ago
  It's not apparent that Linux has won anything, the race is still open. Where are the real contenders is my question? Apparently they are still stuck at the starting line, discussing endlessly how perfect their system will be when they finally choose the right language to implement it in.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Making an OS takes a lot of manpower. Linux absorbs most of the programmer hours, the BSDs take almost all of the rest. What is left over for projects like Redox is a tiny team of developers. You can't expect a ton of hardware support to come out of those efforts.
    - nineteen999 6y ago
      Linux and the BSD's grew to support x86/Sparc/POWER/Alpha/ARM/68K hardware in a time when hardware drivers mostly had to be reverse engineered from scratch or donated from companies that wanted support for their hardware mainlined into the kernel. As a result, anyone working on Redox, Fuschia, or whatever popular contender now have a massive library of driver source code to refer to when working in their languages of choice. This is not a resource that the Linux and 386BSD communities had when starting out. Rust isn't as standardized or at critical mass yet, as C was when Linux was launched. The language still lacks comparative mindshare, no matter how popular it is here on HN. That's why there aren't enough developers.
aidenn0 6y ago
Nobody said that Linux was bad, just that it's not secure.
- nineteen999 6y ago
  I didn't say that Linux wasn't bad, or that it was secure, I asked you to point to a current replacement that is in a better position, which you've declined to do.
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    If Linux is bad and insecure, what was the point of your comment?
    - nineteen999 6y ago
      > I asked you to point to a current replacement that is in a better position, which you've declined to do. I never said "Linux is bad and insecure" either, and when making blanket assertions like that, it's helpful to have a point of reference. So I ask again, which free software, widely deployed, battle tested and highly secure operating system are you comparing Linux to? That was the very obvious point of my comment, which you have apparently missed (ignored?) twice now.
      - aidenn0 6y ago
        I mean you could have asked "what operating system that starts with an L out there are you comparing Linux to," so you picked those specific features for a reason. I would like to know why.
        nineteen999 6y ago
        > you picked those specific features for a reason. I would like to know why. I think this is a good question, and I was wondering if someone would ask that. To be more specific, I think points (1), (3) and (4) are of primary importance, so I would address those specifically: 1) commercial, proprietary and expensive systems were very fragmented and incompatible with each other, especially UNIX, and VMS, Windows etc. Nobody seems to want to go back to that. I think this is the biggest hurdle for any new commercial system to overcome, otherwise Linux (or other, better free systems) will continue to dominate until a better replacement comes along. Look what happened to Solaris. Better than Linux in some respects, worse in some, but it failed to retain its market share. Windows is not hugely used as a server platform either like it was in the early 2000's outside the infrastructure required to support Active Directory, Exchange and Sharepoint. 3) obviously popular server hardware needs to be supported by the system, eg. HP, Cisco UCS, DELL etc. This should be evident by the amount of effort that vendors like Redhat put into patching their kernel to ensure compatibility with hardware from major server vendors. If the proposed alternatives don't support these hardware platforms then they are going to find it hard to gain traction. 4) you aren't going to migrate people away en-masse from a C-based system like Linux without being able to support the major languages and ecosystems that rely on C and/or C++ for their runtimes. People will still need to run their Tomcat applications, Ruby on Rails, Python, NodeJS etc. all of which currently depend on C or C++ to some extent. I think at least Redox is addressing this somewhat with their "relibc" implementation, which would allow "legacy" C codebases to be hosted there in the future, but let's be pragmatic and admit that it's probably a long way off. As somebody who builds/manages emergency services communications platform based on Linux that supports over 70,000 front line emergency services workers, who in turn provide criticial services to over 6 million people, those are the reasons why I see no currently viable platform worth migrating to in the short to medium term _for our particular application_. In addition to self-hosted environments like ours, Linux currently also has a very particular grip within cloud hosted environments as well (which aren't particularly relevant to me at this point in time). In order for non-C based platforms to take off, you either need to support the C runtimes, or be prepared to wait a long time as other languages that don't depend on a C runtime become popular and the ecosystem grows enough.
pjmlp 6y ago
Free beer has nothing to do with moving the world, and rest assured that Linux will fade away when everyone involved with its creation is gone. It is already starting with MIT/BSD/Apache OSes for IoT.
- nineteen999 6y ago
  May or not eventually be true, but your response as per usual wholly misses the point and is irrelevant.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    And as usual some people get up on their nerves and feel like answering irrelevant comments instead of moving on.
    - nineteen999 6y ago
      I'm not the slightest bit unnerved by your comment. But if you feel like answering the original question I posed then I'm all ears. Even if I indulge your fantasy for a moment - Linux (amongst other systems) has provided myself and many others with a solid career for the better part of the last 25 years, daily security patches from vendors and all, and I don't see any solid evidence of that changing before I retire. Further I suggest most Linux people would be able to adapt if the world were to move on to an improved competitor with enough momentum to be adopted en masse - which hasn't happened.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        That has nothing to do with its technical capabilities, rather a free beer UNIX clone, that is all.