1y ago

Building a secure Operating System (Redox OS) with Rust (Interview)

Very interesting and understandable explanations of low level architecture and filesystems, namespaces, userspace, kernel functions, drivers etc.

Highly recommend!

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1y ago

Building a secure Operating System (Redox OS) with Rust (Interview)

32 comments

GPL or bust
- What about MPL? That seen more accepted in the rust space.
  Agreed though, I don't know what the obsession with some of rust based GNU project placement stuff on going backwards on copyleft. Like I want to contribute to the next Linux not the next base for an Apple to take over and write a nice foot note about.
  
  Don't be so negative. Apple donated over 1,000$ back to FreeBSD in 2021: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationType=individual&donationYear=2021
- What benefit would it provide though? It's a microkernel so you could just add non-free drivers in the userspace. Things like Playstation would choose BSD instead.
  
  Harder GPL. Like v3 something.
Redox doesnt seem secure at all to me, i tried it out in a VM today and there was a publicly accessible file at the root of the file system containing unhashed credentials
- Very interesting, please report that to them, it may be because of some experimental stage.
  For example an installation media needs some form of accessible first user creation. Anaconda etc may be more advanced here.
- I imagine their focus is elsewhere. They probably just wanted a proof of concept login system to test things.
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https://piped.video/watch?v=StLzsDU2-oo
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The biggest lie of programming these days is just because something is coded in [trendy "secure" language of the day, including Rust] means it's secure. Bullcrap. It's how you code things that make it secure or not. You can be proficient enough in C to make programs that are much more secure vs. rust. The fact that everyone makes mistakes and programming is an enormous beast to wrangle with makes things insecure and needs to be monitored and fixed.
- You're just partially correct.
  With Rust you get compile time guarantees that your code doesn't have a specific class of vulnerabilities. Can you do that with C?
  
  Yes, it's called "not being a shit programmer."
- Nope, rust is ideal for kernel code, it really is an improvement.
  Writing kernel in C is like building a house with a hammer on loosen handle, there is too much give and the builder has to tap it a few times before every strike. You could say the builder knows how to build and secure a house, but hes still a human. The loosen handle adds too much difficulty result in errors which would otherwise be avoided.
  
  Right here, is what I'm talking about. People believe that the code/language itself is inherently safe/secure or unsafe depending on what you choose and that's wrong. It's what the programmer does with that code that makes it safe or unsafe, secure or insecure. You can have the best designed and engineered materials on the planet and people are still going to be able to make things that will fall over and cause massive disasters with it. Stop bowing down to freaking Rust as if it's the damn savior of computing and programming. In the end, it's just another language and one another step removed from low level computing where it's easiest to deal with hardware-level and basic functionality systems at a huge cost.
- The rust standard lib uses unsafe in various places too. Even if you avoided every other category of error in your code logic, you could still end up with UB.
- Well, guess who shouldn't be programming then?
- https://youtu.be/StLzsDU2-oo?t=1427

32 comments