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EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution designed from scratch for containers

easyos.org

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Re: EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution designed from scratch for containers

#61

Post by [deleted] »

msla wrote: post #55
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #39

After spending a scant few minutes looking at it, here are the things I like about this project so far: - It has a "How and why are we different" page. In the age of "I made a meta package on top of Ubuntu and called it a new OS", it's refreshing to see a Linux distribution come right out and say "here's what we do that separates us from the other 700". - It actually is different. Recognizing the nigh-uselessness of…

> embracing of simple GUI tools over terminal wankery, eschewing of the legacy UNIX file hierarchy. So you're telling me I have no tools and no existing tools are going to work. Good to get that out in the open, I suppose.

[deleted]

Re: EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution designed from scratch for containers

#62

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

msla wrote: post #55
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #39

After spending a scant few minutes looking at it, here are the things I like about this project so far: - It has a "How and why are we different" page. In the age of "I made a meta package on top of Ubuntu and called it a new OS", it's refreshing to see a Linux distribution come right out and say "here's what we do that separates us from the other 700". - It actually is different. Recognizing the nigh-uselessness of…

> embracing of simple GUI tools over terminal wankery, eschewing of the legacy UNIX file hierarchy. So you're telling me I have no tools and no existing tools are going to work. Good to get that out in the open, I suppose.

God forbid someone not create another Ubuntu derivative that isn't substantively different than every other Linux distro on earth, right?

Re: EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution designed from scratch for containers

#63

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

msla wrote: post #56
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I'd agree with. The concept of user and group are hand-me-downs from systems built for sharing networked resources and pretty much requires some kind of centralized AAA to make any sense. They're a model designed for protecting the system from users and users from eachother, but that doesn't make any sense on a personal computer where the more pressing need is to protect the user from malicious applicati…

> that doesn't make any sense on a personal computer where the more pressing need is to protect the user from malicious applications. Of course it makes sense. Running applications as restricted users has been standard practice for decades, precisely because it makes sense.

> Running applications as restricted users has been standard practice for decades

...as a way of preventing users from interfering with the system or other users in multi user systems. Running applications as a user different from yourself is an ugly hack we've started doing because we don't have actual control over what our applications can access, so things like ransomware are possible despite not having system level access. Since Plan9 never took off, containerization of applications is the next best thing.

What I'm saying is, running in a restricted user account does absolutely nothing to protect the user running in the restricted account from malicious applciations. That's how the user/group model fails in personal computing.

Re: EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution designed from scratch for containers

#64

Post by e12e »

dexen wrote: post #43
als0 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d personally say that the concept of users and user groups have failed, at least on systems that have only one user.

>the concept of users and user groups have failed Hopefully we won't go back to the Win95/98 era of everything running as single user! Having services run isolated as their own users is not merely a good security mechanics, it provides for a clear and simple mental model of what is what. A clear permissions barrier that's enforced pretty strictly by the OS. Moreover we see separate user accounts more and more; even o…

So, you run three different Gmail accounts in chrome, and two different office 365 logins in Firefox. Not only can the firefox process, under you user ID, read/write chrome's cache, local data etc and vice versa, but so can your calculator app, your cpu temperature widget and your solitaire game.

Lxc can improve a bit on this, as can "containers" (lxc or otherwise restricted processes).

Re: EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution designed from scratch for containers

#65

Post by Already__Taken »

dstroot wrote: post #51
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #39

After spending a scant few minutes looking at it, here are the things I like about this project so far: - It has a "How and why are we different" page. In the age of "I made a meta package on top of Ubuntu and called it a new OS", it's refreshing to see a Linux distribution come right out and say "here's what we do that separates us from the other 700". - It actually is different. Recognizing the nigh-uselessness of…

Anyone know how this compares to CoreOS? Whatever happened to them?

The company coreos renamed their distro coreos to Container Linux (have fun googling help for that) then later they coreos were bought by redhat.

container linux is forked off my the community as flatcar linux. Redhats container linux is getting rolled into fedora silverblue or something? This paragraph I'm not really sure about.

Re: EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution designed from scratch for containers

#67

Post by pas »

Already__Taken wrote: post #65
dstroot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone know how this compares to CoreOS? Whatever happened to them?

The company coreos renamed their distro coreos to Container Linux (have fun googling help for that) then later they coreos were bought by redhat. container linux is forked off my the community as flatcar linux. Redhats container linux is getting rolled into fedora silverblue or something? This paragraph I'm not really sure about.

There is Fedora CoreOS, it seems pretty active.

https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker

Re: EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution designed from scratch for containers

#68

Post by jjtheblunt »

andridk wrote: post #7

If everything is a container, does that mean processes have failed?

Containers run processes, in a context where those within a container only see those within the same container, by underlying OS accounting generalization.

Re: EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution designed from scratch for containers

#69

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #37
als0 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d personally say that the concept of users and user groups have failed, at least on systems that have only one user.

This is what I'd agree with. The concept of user and group are hand-me-downs from systems built for sharing networked resources and pretty much requires some kind of centralized AAA to make any sense. They're a model designed for protecting the system from users and users from eachother, but that doesn't make any sense on a personal computer where the more pressing need is to protect the user from malicious applicati…

I like being protected from writing to /dev/sda by mistake. If an OS is going to expose its guts to the world it makes sense to have permission controls on the vulnerable parts.

Re: EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution designed from scratch for containers

#70

Post by GordonS »

pas wrote: post #67
Already__Taken wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company coreos renamed their distro coreos to Container Linux (have fun googling help for that) then later they coreos were bought by redhat. container linux is forked off my the community as flatcar linux. Redhats container linux is getting rolled into fedora silverblue or something? This paragraph I'm not really sure about.

There is Fedora CoreOS, it seems pretty active. https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker

I'm actually looking for a good container hosting OS right now. I remember hearing some stuff about CoreOS being deprecated or something, but I can't find anything concrete?!

Do you know what the situation is?

I also looked a bit at RancherOS today, which looked pretty cool, but it seems to use 10x the memory of CoreOS...

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