Re: My broken dream.

[William Leslie]

2009/9/18 Alan Grimes <address@hidden>:
> I'm fascinated to read that "L4 was rejected for hurd." I mean Jezus god
> damned motherfucking christ. Who could possibly reject the world's best
> publicly available kernel? Seriously, I am dying to read what the asshat
> ( http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ass-hat ) who made such
> a decision could possibly say for itself.
>
> Okay, now that I've enjoyed my daily screed against unix and all of its
> flavors, what do I like?, well I'll tell you. I want to see what I call
> a "system oriented operating system". A system where no program is any
> weaker than the kernel. -- Ie, can provide an internal operating
> environment. I wrote a paper on it back in 2001. However I am far too
> lame to get the project going myself, mainly because I couldn't find the
> documentation I needed back when I had the time and energy to work on
> such a project. =((
>
> If you want a more buzzwordy description of essentially the same basic
> idea, read: http://www.ok-labs.com/solutions/secure-hypercell-technology

While it has always been easy for software on top of L4 to provide an
equivalent operating environment, it was not at the time possible to
/secure/ that operating environment (outside of implementing some form
of interpreter that validates all operations). This was why there was
so much discussion on securing L4 or choosing a new kernel.

This may not be true today, but this is a very recent development. Do
you think it is worth throwing away all the current work (on an L4
derived kernel no less) ? For what benefit? Who is going to do the
work of porting the existing resource accounting code?

William Leslie