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i find it "interesting" that all the complains are about useability from a "userland" developer pov. Generally what comes from that are patched up systems to "r
by zobzu 13y ago
i find it "interesting" that all the complains are about useability from a "userland" developer pov.
Generally what comes from that are patched up systems to "run stuff in kernel" because "its safe and fast"
Which of course is not true.
There are however various attempts to make a "proper" "modern" OS but all of these have failed due to the lack of commercial backing. There is apparently no financial interest into having a secure, scalable, fast, deterministic, simple OS right now (which, oh, requires rewriting all your apps, obviously)
Even Microsoft tried. Yes, Microsoft did an excellent such OS.
- pjmlp 13y agoThey haven't given up yet. The Mindori project is still secret, so who knows what they are doing there, while some of the team is nowadays playing with the concept of pico-hipervisors and running the full OS as a library instead. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/drawbridge/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/drawbridge/
- zobzu 13y agoI somehow hadn't noticed it, even thus its not new. Thanks :)
- qznc 13y agoWell, there is a lot of interest in a secure, scalable, fast, deterministic, simple OS which is also backwards compatible. ;) What do you mean by "safe" though? How is kernel-space safer then user-space?
- zobzu 13y agoNote that the part where I mentioned kernel and safe used quotes because its sarcastic. The modern oses do have kernels that are much safer than what we use day to day, however. They're indeed not in C. In general the core is typed ASM and it runs a a managed language right on top. The kernel is generally written with that and uses various concepts that separate privileges as much as possible for security, reliability and predictability, basically. That includes kernel components, and obviously drivers. Messages between components are also generally declared ("contracted") with well defined types.
- pjmlp 13y agoBy being written in systems programming languages safer than C.
- alberich 13y agoThis could catch some programming bugs, sure, but it wouldn't make the OS much safer. You can still have attacks on integrity, privacy and availability.
- pjmlp 13y agoAgreed, but the attack window would be smaller, that is what counts. If you really want to attack a system, nothing beats social engineering anyway.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoThat would require building consensus around such a language. I mean, yes, this is one of my own hobby projects, but Rust is the most fully-developed attempt made so far and it still doesn't have the kind of developer backing that C did in the BSD days.
- pjmlp 13y agoI am old enough to remember when C only had backing from people working on UNIX systems, while other systems were either using Assembly or another high level language e.g. PL/I, Algol or Pascal dialect.