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Announcing KataOS and Sparrow
- trasz 4y ago
- fs111 4y ago
- yopoly 4y ago[flagged]
- fs111 4y agoI doubt they had Terry in mind. Given the outrageous things he said later in his life, googles marketing will not want to be associated with that.
- yopoly 4y agoIt wasn't that outrageous considering how ill he was. If he was of sound mind, then yes - but he wasn't.
- indymike 4y agoYou do know that Terry was extremely mentally ill? This comment comes across as insensitive to him condition and to others that dare to participate in society with mental illness.
- fs111 4y agoYes, I know all about that. That does not change that a marketing department will want to stay far away from the things he said, no matter why.
- filoleg 4y agoWith all respect for Terry and being fully aware that the outrageous parts of behavior were almost definitely a result of his mental illness - no one in their right mind would intentionally try to associate their product with him in marketing. It isn't about "how dare he participate in society" (which is irrelevant, as he is, sadly, not alive anymore). You just simply dont associate your product in public with someone who talks about "cia glowies in a van outside of my house, trying to bait me with a handgun and an underage child" or records a video of themselves calling a black person outside an N-word with hard "r" (and then gets hit by that person). Again, sad story for Terry, and I genuinely feel compassion for the man. He clearly had a brilliant mind trapped in his head, but his mental illness took over it entirely. To the point where he became literally about as marketable as the Unabomber, and probably even less. It isn't insensitive to say that his behavior (regardless of the mental illness) makes it impossible to attach his likeness to your product in a positive way.
- indymike 4y agoA little empathy goes a long way.
- filoleg 4y agoI have plenty of empathy for Terry as a person, and I think what happened to him is a tragedy. As someone who had been following his journey with TempleOS for quite a long time, I genuinely feel for his circumstance. He had a brilliant mind and probably would have went onto achieve quite a few impressive things, if it wasn't for his mental illness. However, none of that would make him more "advertising-friendly" and override the perception caused by his public outbursts (which were driven by his illness). People were "canceled" for way less. That's just the reality. No amount of empathy on my end would make someone saying the n-word (with a hard "r") n a derogatory way towards a black person and recording it on video any more advertising-friendly.
- indymike 4y agoOne of the hallmarks of insensitivity is doubling down on it by using justification like, "that's just the reality." Be better than that.
- ris 4y agoI'm trying to figure out what (if any) relation this has to Kata Conatiners (https://katacontainers.io/ https://katacontainers.io/) - it can't be a coincidence.
- gautamdivgi 4y agoThe article mentions this but there are 2 main components that are not Google owned. SeL4 microkernel and the antimicro simulator. The git repo mentions that KataOS is the system services on SeL4. It is possible there is significant overlap with katacontainers.
- jt2190 4y agoInteresting link, thanks for sharing! I’m only aware of one other attempt to secure the entire stack: Oxide Computing (focused more on data centers I think.)
- jtgans 4y agoActually, it is a coincidince. Picking names is hard, and I actually had no idea this project existed before I named ours.
- thefourthchime 4y agoHell, I've worked on two different projects called FLEX from two different companies.
- nix23 4y agoPff....i installed ~thousand different OS's who call themself Linux, they even had different libc's.
- ladyanita22 4y agoWhat about Fuchsia?
- timeon 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223040
- hestefisk 4y ago
- downvoteme1 4y ago
- jtgans 4y agoActually, this is an engineer-driven project in research, not a PM driven project. The team and I have quite a lot of passion for this project and are doing everything we can to fight that kind of thing from happening, which is why we open sourced it. Please bear with us.
- Ptchd 4y ago> this is an engineer-driven project in research Does that mean that it hasn't been approved yet at the highest level?
- phoe-krk 4y ago
- johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
- InCityDreams 4y ago
- mutt2016 4y ago
- google234123 4y agoWait, I thought Fuchsia was the OS google was working on.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoAnd Android, and the associated real-time bits that run underneath Android (lk? The thing that provides fastboot), and Chrome OS, and whatever internal Debian modifications they're running. Google is apparently quite capable of maintaining at least three or four operating systems developments at once; what's 2-3 more?
- green-eclipse 4y agoJust like the other tech titans. Microsoft has multiple OSes, as does Apple.
- jug 4y agoI think they are working on both. If it’s an IOT OS this one might have a radically different goal.
- olliej 4y agoI thought Fuchsia was going to be their secure OS, and I actually worked on it... I guess not? This is like a really dumb version of the 90s era MS competing teams nonsense. All I can see is it burning out a lot of really talented engineers.
- neuronexmachina 4y agoBased on my skimming, I think Fuchsia is aimed more towards being an Android/ChromeOS replacement, while KataOS/Sparrow looks like it's more aimed towards low-power embedded systems and IoT.
- summerlight 4y agoThose embedded devices cannot run Fuchsia due to its resource consumption and this project is more of being a research than a mature product.
- sumedh 4y agoBefore reading the comments, I had a prediction that most of them would be about Google shutting it down in X years.
- ClassyJacket 4y ago
- nextaccountic 4y agoDoes this uses anything from the Robigalia project? https://rbg.systems/ https://rbg.systems/
- jtgans 4y agoActually, yes. We ported the seL4 crate to the latest kernel and modified it to better fit our needs. It's part of the OSS release, and we're hoping we can contribute it back to that project once we've done some more polishing to it.
- im_down_w_otp 4y agoDid you look at https://github.com/auxoncorp/ferros https://github.com/auxoncorp/ferros
- nextaccountic 4y agoThanks. You say about the OSS release, so, what parts (if any) aren't OSS yet? Is there a timeline for releasing more parts of this project as OSS?
- CaptainJustin 4y agoThe IOT space is famously immature on security. Hopefully Google's efforts here will go some way to improving the security side
- meibo 4y agoSomeone should build an extension to filter all of the low-effort "haha when will this one be shut down" garbage below every single news post about a Google product. It's getting a little tiresome.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- geerlingguy 4y agoIt's the most relevant feature to speculate about for any non-ad-targeted product Google introduces, so I don't begrudge people for commenting on it. It's to the point I just ignore any Google product launch, at least in terms of consideration for my own use. 5-10 years is an incredibly short lifespan, and there's usually no off-ramp. The product just dies off.
- endisneigh 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bitcharmer 4y agoIt's Google's own fault that anything new they launch these days has a meme status. I don't see anything wrong in pointing this out. Similarly, many people avoid watching Netflix shows until they survive to season 3 at least because it's not worth investing your time in something that's likely to get cancelled after a season or two. It's their own doing and mocking it is fully deserved
- Something1234 4y agoMaybe, just maybe more shows should be built around being a single season long with fewer rear end pulls. I'm so sick of these multiseason shows that just do nothing or don't answer questions.
- schelling42 4y ago>As the foundation for this new operating system, we chose seL4 as the microkernel because it puts security front and center; it is mathematically proven secure, with guaranteed confidentiality, integrity, and availability. >KataOS provides a verifiably-secure platform that protects the user's privacy because it is logically impossible for applications to breach the kernel's hardware security protections and the system components are verifiably secure. The wording seems quite confident, maybe it could use some additional "at least according to its specification". This approach doesn't protect against hardware bugs and side-channel attacks. Especially when one thinks of unexpected attacks like Rowhammer, there is probably no way to include them in a formal systems model beforehand.
- zahllos 4y agoYes, especially 'logically impossible' when you dig into the details. From the blogpost: > and the kernel modifications to seL4 that can reclaim the memory used by the rootserver. MMMMMMMMMMMkkkkkk. So you then have to ask: were these changes also formally verified? There's a metric ton of kernel changes here: https://github.com/AmbiML/sparrow-kernel/commits/sparrow https://github.com/AmbiML/sparrow-kernel/commits/sparrow but I don't see a fork of https://github.com/seL4/l4v https://github.com/seL4/l4v anywhere inside AmbiML. I mean, it does also claim to be "almost entirely written in Rust", which is true if you ignore almost the entire OS part of the OS (the kernel and the minimal seL4 runtime).
- jtgans 4y agoTL from the project here: you're right, the changes to the kernel are not yet formally verified, but that's on the roadmap -- there's quite a lot of work that has been done here, and tons more to come. The vast majority of changes we have made have involved lots of conversations with folks on the seL4 mailing list including Gernot Heiser and video conferences to work out the best way to do what we're doing. I realize the blog post comes out pretty strongly on this topic, and that's my oversight -- I let my aspirations leak out instead of tempering them (this is not your typical PM-driven project) properly. Please understand that this is an engineer-driven project in Research with a very small team where we're doing our hardest to do the right thing, so please bear with us.
- tannhaeuser 4y ago> Rust [...] eliminates entire classes of bugs, such as off-by-one errors [...]. How so? OBO is a logic error isn't it?
- pas 4y agoIterators all the way down, maybe some const generics, who knows? :)
- eldenring 4y agoNot 100% sure what they mean, but a lot of the api choices really try to make indexing decisions explicit. ex: Bounds::Excluded and iterators like the other commenter mentioned.
- efficax 4y agoRust gaurantees (except in unsafe code) that off-by-one errors will never lead to reading or writing from outside of safe memory bounds. You can still call `unwrap` on a out-of-bounds vector index and get a panic (panics are considered safe since they are memory safe), although you should not be using unwrap in ways that can panic in production code.
- atty 4y agoIt can’t stop me from accessing index 1 when I meant 0 on a 3d array, so I think the claim doesn’t make much sense. Rust can stop me from accessing index N+1 though, which is useful for security. Of course almost every language also has support for bounds checked arrays either in their core or their standard library, and some for of array iterators, so I don’t think that’s a particularly compelling reason to choose Rust.
- cmeacham98 4y agoWhat are the bounds checked arrays in C's or C++'s standard library?
- haolez 4y agoYou can enable bound checking when calling the compiler. I don't remember the actual command line flags, though.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoSparrow OS was the previous name for TempleOS
- jtgans 4y agoAhh, that's unfortunate. Naming things is hard. If I had realized that was onenof the projects' prior names, I probably wouldn't have gone with that name. TBH, I have huge respect for LoseTHos / SparrowOS / TempleOS's creator Terry. He accomplished something very unique and made it flourish in the hardest of situations.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoI also have respect for him. He had divine intellect, was the smartest developer that ever lived and won a chess match against God. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Raej8C2yIEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Raej8C2yIEc I think your new OS needs realistic elephants.
- destroy-2A 4y ago
- pluc 4y ago
- addajones 4y agoHere I was thinking they re-released the Sparrow e-mail client they bought years ago and destroyed.
- jtgans 4y agoAh, darn. Sorry -- picking names is hard.
- akerr 4y agoIf only there was some way to search for existing project names… To be fair, Sparrow hasn’t existed for a while… sigh.
- Manjuuu 4y agoCame here to say this, I still have it in the Applications folder even if I don't use it anymore. Too perfect.
- akerr 4y agoSame here! Surely they could release it as open source?
- maximilianburke 4y ago
- redleggedfrog 4y ago
- anderspitman 4y agoIt's open source
- unraveller 4y agono doubt this date does exist, if traction is not realized by X shutdown. It's a sick game of praise and share hard or your shit dies, dev438467211. turns out google does have support minions, providing one way support for google (under duress).
- imwillofficial 4y agoThat’s just what I want, an OS from google for my embedded systems
- joezydeco 4y agoWait until you find out how many projects use AOSP as an application layer on embedded systems. It's obscene.
- childintime 4y agoPerhaps the more interesting page is: https://antmicro.com/blog/2022/08/running-rust-programs-in-sel4/ https://antmicro.com/blog/2022/08/running-rust-programs-in-s... More about Rust and the architecture. I know Renode of its RISC-V meetup presentations, can't say I was impressed favorably.
- pyed 4y ago
- Move37 4y ago
- electromech 4y ago> For now the only target that works is "aarch64" (for a raspi3b machine running in simulation on qemu). Bummer! I recently purchased an STM32 development board specifically to try out Rust-based embedded projects like this.
- jtgans 4y agoYeahh, sorry! We had a short timeframe and wanted to get something out for something most folks had, so the Pi seemed like an obvious target. That being said, seL4 has a hard requirement for an MMU, so I'm not sure an STM32 would work (based upon my admittedly very quick review of their product line for a side project of mine -- happy to be proven wrong!)
- grodriguez100 4y agoSTM32MP15x.
- michelb 4y ago
- rossjudson 4y agoIt's amusing/saddening that significant numbers of commenters assume launch == promotion at Google today. The vast majority of promotions at Google are for impact on engineering efforts that never reach the public's attention. Boring, no-comment-worthy stuff like "cut CPU usage by 10% in the service", or "reduced out XX of support toil", or "reduced attack surface of YY by ZZ". "Launched product AA" is pretty rare as a promo argument.
- shapefrog 4y ago
- crazygringo 4y agoThat is entirely inappropriate here on HN.
- jtgans 4y agoAhh, if only. No, nobody got promoted for this. This was me and Sam working hard to get this resesrch project out as open source.
- KerrAvon 4y agotl;dr: this is a research project to produce a new, highly secure from the ground up, OS suitable for low-resource / IoT devices. Google Death Clock doesn’t apply until/if it’s productized.
- Havoc 4y ago>the seL4 CAmkES framework Naming convention could use a bit of work, but otherwise good news.
- yencabulator 4y agoThose names come from the existing seL4 project that these googlers are merely using/forking. (CAmkES is a hot mess, and "unpleasantly too much C" if you ask me. https://docs.sel4.systems/projects/camkes/ https://docs.sel4.systems/projects/camkes/ & https://github.com/seL4/camkes-tool/blob/master/docs/index.md https://github.com/seL4/camkes-tool/blob/master/docs/index.m...)
- freecodyx 4y agoIs it down. Can’t access the link
- shrubble 4y ago'Internally, KataOS also is able to dynamically load and run third-party applications built outside of the CAmkES framework.' jumped out at me... is it just that they are testing other compiled apps or something else
- jtgans 4y agoSomething else. We are actually sandboxing dynamically loaded applications in a hybrid CAmkES environment, while using CAmkES as a way to help statically analyze and componentize the rest of the userland services.
- hericium 4y ago
- dang 4y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive comments to HN. You may not owe $CEO better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- hericium 4y agoI'm not a SEO "writer" who produces longish texts to transmit a short message. From my perspective, privacy seems important to this community. At least some participants aren't capitalists focused on squeezing every cent from users. Upvotes my comment gained before you saw it tell me that not all users of this forum found it to be unsubstantive. But of course you're the judge.
- dang 4y agoYou can't judge these things by upvotes. Sensationalism, indignation, and flamebait routinely attract plenty of upvotes. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22upvotes%20alone%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... We're just trying to avoid the dead-end discussions that low-quality internet comments lead to, including name-calling, fulmination, snark, and the other things that the site guidelines ask people not to do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- drooopy 4y ago[flagged]
- freedomben 4y agoAs a security engineer, I see this as a great development to a more secure future. As a user who increasingly sees the security of systems turned against him (as though the user is a threat as well) I see this as another step toward a dystopia. @jtgans (or anybody else involved) if you feel comfortable saying, is that something that is being considered/discussed? Google in general (IMHO) has a good track record here with Anroid and Chromebooks (particularly compared to Apple, Amazon, etc). I love that Android phones can be user unlocked and chromebooks have dev mode, but I do worry whether that is just a leftover from an earlier age and whether those sorts of things will soon be a relic of the past.
- midislack 4y agoTerry Davis's TempleOS was called Sparrow before. Shame on Google.
- rektide 4y agoSpecifying embedded ML systems specifically is an interesting specialization: > Our team in Google Research has set out to solve this problem by building a provably secure platform that's optimized for embedded devices that run ML applications.
- THENATHE 4y agoCan someone TLDR what this is eventually going to be or currently being used for?