written in rust, everything. what do you think
2 Likes
I've seen a few videos on Redox. That thing is freaking fast.
Looking at the forum, someone from IBM is helping out on the project, and one of the head developers of Redox quit his job to further develop the OS.
1 Like
the guy in the video currently works at system76. they seem to have some smart ppl on board with it.
1 Like
I watched the interview today. It looks very interesting. For a small team, well all most all Jeremy.
A microkernel will have higher security and stability, but lower performance. The OS isn't viable yet also. Seems interesting tho.
really isnt monolithic more secure?
AFAIK not really - in a monolithic kernel more stuff runs in the same address space as the kernel. This means you have less context switching but there can be issues where for example a kernel module does malicious things or there's an exploitable bug which can be used by a program in userspace.
2 Likes
I saw it yesterday, and I just like how optimistic the guy is. He really has a lot of faith in what he develops, which I really like.
Do keep in mind that the driver support is very limited - it doesn't seem to support any real hardware yet.
The microkernel and all drivers in userland reminded my of a project I thought was interesting long ago that went nowhere.
Is was from the evil overlords but.
They also have a developer from Elementary there, so then again, maybe blind luck.
is joke - i no has superiority complex - cuck is my new favorite word - elementary could be worse - it's fine, totally fine - kill it with fire - maybe
Monolithic does not necessarily mandate that everything, including the kitchen sink, run at ring 0, but that has certainly been the prevailing model. For example, Windows NT originally ran video drivers in user space. Microsoft subsequently determined that a large percentage of blue screens were caused by video driver issues. Be that as it may, they were still willing to do a deal with the devil. In an effort to increase performance. Starting with NT 4.0, they moved graphics from ring 3 to ring 0. This did increase the speed and responsiveness of the OS, but at what cost?
If something in ring 3 gets Borked, that's pretty inconvenient. But, when you can pwn something in ring 0 you can REALLY ruin someone's day! Not only that, but a misbehaving module in ring 0 can more easily crash the entire system. So in a world where there is no such thing as perfect code, a monolithic kernel architecture, where privilege is handed out indiscriminately, can significantly contribute to instability issues, add additional attack vectors for the bad guys and just generally add to the complexity and difficulty of finding and squashing critical bugs.
I never said that everything runs at ring 0.
Agreed; I wasn't suggesting that you had.
I was merely underscoring the fact that there is a degree of variety in this architecture and that not all monolithic kernels are undisciplined and inherently bad. There are shades of grey.
I suppose that the same could be said of micro-kernels. In the vid, Brian's guest is complaining that his kernel has 10,000 lines of code and he feels that this is too bloated. That is remarkable, compared to the Linux kernel, which now contains in excess of 20 million lines of code and they routinely add ~30k lines of code and subtract ~20k lines of code from it every day! The Linux kernel on my laptop is a whopping 6.9Mb!!! I find it amazing that with all of this complexity, Linux servers are famous for running in excess of one year, without the need for a reboot.
I expect that there are many younger folks here who don't have any first hand experience with the fact that it was considered normal to have to reboot Windows +/- four times a day, because it would crash, become unresponsive, or otherwise just misbehave. When NT came along, it was a revelation. Finally an OS that wasn't made by Fisher-Price. The MS developers did a good job with NT, but the (presumably) Marketing Department folks demanded more speed, regardless of the consequences. In light of their knowledge of how troublesome video drivers were at the time, it must have broken the devs hearts to have to move video to ring 0 on an OS that was marketed towards professionals, rather than the general public.
I just romance with the OS that keeps on running when you pull out the GFX card while it is running or a HD etc. I like action movies and like that OS software being bulletproof. I want my OS to be all but dead and still running in the CPU,MB and RAM with a half assed power supply with a bullet hole.
Thats the OS in my dreams.
1 Like