Live data from Hacker News

Lions OS: secure – fast – adaptable

trustworthy.systems

41–50 of 64 posts

Re: Lions OS: secure – fast – adaptable

#41

Question: under what circumstances would I ever want to use this OS, over Linux or MacOS or Windows?

I've been waiting for a system like this for over a decade to use as my daily driver. An OS that runs with a capability model like this is immune to whole classes of security exploits that guarantee Linux, Windows, MacOS, etc. will never be secure. I was hoping Genode would get there sooner, and GNU Hurd should have gotten there years ago. Capabilities are the computing version of circuit breakers. They make it possi…

FWIW, I would not trust seL4 on x86. Last time I checked, seL4’s interaction with the x86 architecture was not formally verified and looked quite buggy.

Even a microkernel has three things that form part of the TCB: the part that interfaces with the even-lower-level stuff (interrupt and exception handlers, paging, memory model, etc), the interface it provides to its clients (syscalls and whatever it provides via syscalls), and the code that glues the first two parts together and implements the microkernel’s internal logic.

The latter two, in seL4, are straightforward and formally verified. The former, on x86, not so much.

AIUI, the situation on ARM is likely better.

Re: Lions OS: secure – fast – adaptable

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a nobody in every sense of the word. I didn't go to a fancy school; I didn't join a startup or a unicorn; I've worked as a corporate web dev for 20 years using ASP.Net and C#; I know very few people in tech (and no one high up). My posts are never "shadow deleted" they in fact sometimes get a boost from the mods when they though it just missed the mark timing-wise (i.e. interesting post, but some breaking news th…

I am not the original poster, so what's your explanation for why his two attempts were both deleted?

If I had to guess, their username contains "idiot" and so might have tripped up the spam detector.

But you can always email the mods. They're very responsive.

Re: Lions OS: secure – fast – adaptable

#43
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren't deleted, the account was brand new when they were posted so they were probably killed by the spam detector. Questions about stuff like that should just be sent to hn@ycombinator.com, that's in all the site docs.

A spam detector that just kills anything from people new to the site, + it not ever being reviewed/revived, is pretty uncool IMO.

They are speculating, but there is no telling if it ever even happened. I tend to believe the site's news was just more interesting than what OOP posted.

Re: Lions OS: secure – fast – adaptable

#44
post #26

Tangentially related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Commentary_on_the_UNIX_Opera... The LionsOS name is a direct callback to the John Lions Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition , an Australian computer scientist and somewhat nomadic Professor. Trustworthy, as seen in the post link, also hails from New South Wales.

One of the reasons UNIX won over the other proprietary systems, without the book and the related AT&T drama, most universities wouldn't have bothered.

Re: Lions OS: secure – fast – adaptable

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genode can also run on sel4.

Are its TCB and integration similarly verified? If not formally-verified, are they in a safe language or statically analyzed to block common errors?

I mean, LionOS appears to (with the exception of sel4 itself) be mainly written in unverified C without heavy static analysis.

So LionOS and Genode appear to be about equal in that regard.

Re: Lions OS: secure – fast – adaptable

#46

Question: under what circumstances would I ever want to use this OS, over Linux or MacOS or Windows?

I've been waiting for a system like this for over a decade to use as my daily driver. An OS that runs with a capability model like this is immune to whole classes of security exploits that guarantee Linux, Windows, MacOS, etc. will never be secure. I was hoping Genode would get there sooner, and GNU Hurd should have gotten there years ago. Capabilities are the computing version of circuit breakers. They make it possi…

Have you tried Genode's Sculpt OS?

"Sculpt is an open-source general-purpose OS. It combines Genode's microkernel architecture, capability-based security, sandboxed device drivers, and virtual machines in a novel operating system for commodity PC hardware and the PinePhone. Sculpt is used as day-to-day OS by the Genode developers."

https://genode.org/download/sculpt

Re: Lions OS: secure – fast – adaptable

#47
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren't deleted, the account was brand new when they were posted so they were probably killed by the spam detector. Questions about stuff like that should just be sent to hn@ycombinator.com, that's in all the site docs.

A spam detector that just kills anything from people new to the site, + it not ever being reviewed/revived, is pretty uncool IMO.

That would be a bad spam detector but it's obviously not one HN uses, not sure how you reached that conclusion.

Re: Lions OS: secure – fast – adaptable

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A spam detector that just kills anything from people new to the site, + it not ever being reviewed/revived, is pretty uncool IMO.

They are speculating, but there is no telling if it ever even happened. I tend to believe the site's news was just more interesting than what OOP posted.

That's Paul Graham's account, so maybe not just speculation. I didn't realize he still read this site. Not to jump on to OPs paranoia but I kind of thought he was frequenting some secret meta-HN site that still talks about entrepreneurship. Paul, if you see this, let me in! I swear I won't complain about capitalism!

Re: Lions OS: secure – fast – adaptable

#49
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A spam detector that just kills anything from people new to the site, + it not ever being reviewed/revived, is pretty uncool IMO.

That would be a bad spam detector but it's obviously not one HN uses, not sure how you reached that conclusion.

That’s what I inferred from your comment

Re: Lions OS: secure – fast – adaptable

#50
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a bad spam detector but it's obviously not one HN uses, not sure how you reached that conclusion.

That’s what I inferred from your comment

Nothing like your inference was in my comment, beside the seemingly obvious fact nobody would use such a 'spam detector'. But either way, you can trivially verify this yourself just by looking at /newest.
Post reply on HN