4 ms·

Does your OS use protected memory? Why? If you knew all your programs, and that they are well-behaved, there is no need for that. But we do use protected memo

Does your OS use protected memory? Why? If you knew all your programs, and that they are well-behaved, there is no need for that. But we do use protected memory. And IOMMU (you know all the peripherals that you connect to your computer as well, right?). And other facilities intended to separate programs and hardware from each other. So the same way as programs do not snoop on shared global heap, do not big-bang i/o ports, etc, programs are not supposed to snoop on shared display surfaces (really just a subset of 'global shared heap'). If you need something specific from them, you ask them via defined way (e.g. screenshot API), that might or might not have facilities to enforce access control. Because we are not relying on them to be well behaved. Instead, we will notice if they aren't.

btschaegg 4y ago
"I was merely endeavoring to indicate that if we do not grab events by the collar they will have us by the throat." SCNR :)
- vetinari 4y ago
  Yup, exactly :-D
michaelmrose 4y ago
If protected memory was implemented somehow per desktop environment and relegated me to choosing between Gnome and KDEs respective browsers/office suites instead of installing Firefox and Emacs I would either eschew it and take the risk or give up on Linux entirely and get a Mac.
- indolering 4y ago
  > If protected memory was implemented somehow per desktop environment I'm sure LOTS of people stopped using certain Unix programs that relied on a single address space whenever that was implemented. But to quote myself a few relies up, >> These are not compelling arguments for running the GUI as root or allowing different applications to spy on each other. > or give up on Linux entirely and get a Mac. You mean the Unix that originally decided against using X11 because it would have required a re-write to do what they wanted anyway [1]? You understand that Wayland was designed by core Xorg contributors to replace X11 because attempts to match OS X resulted in a glitchy nightmare ... right? [1]: https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75257&cid=6734612 https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75257&cid=6734612

btschaegg 4y ago

"I was merely endeavoring to indicate that if we do not grab events by the collar they will have us by the throat." SCNR :)

vetinari 4y ago
Yup, exactly :-D

michaelmrose 4y ago

If protected memory was implemented somehow per desktop environment and relegated me to choosing between Gnome and KDEs respective browsers/office suites instead of installing Firefox and Emacs I would either eschew it and take the risk or give up on Linux entirely and get a Mac.

indolering 4y ago
> If protected memory was implemented somehow per desktop environment I'm sure LOTS of people stopped using certain Unix programs that relied on a single address space whenever that was implemented. But to quote myself a few relies up, >> These are not compelling arguments for running the GUI as root or allowing different applications to spy on each other. > or give up on Linux entirely and get a Mac. You mean the Unix that originally decided against using X11 because it would have required a re-write to do what they wanted anyway [1]? You understand that Wayland was designed by core Xorg contributors to replace X11 because attempts to match OS X resulted in a glitchy nightmare ... right? [1]: https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75257&cid=6734612 https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75257&cid=6734612