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Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

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Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#141

Post by indymike »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #47
ajb wrote: post #7

It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way. Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, ef…

> rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security I believe multi-user systems are actually an ancient, outdated rather than a "modern" concept. It made sense when computers were huge, expensive and many users shared one even at work, let alone at home. Nowadays computers are almost never shared. Even when people used to have just one home PC per family (during pre-Win7 days) they mo…

> I believe multi-user systems are actually an ancient, outdated rather than a "modern" concept.

I thought that in the 80s, and even had the same experience with sharing the family PC. Then networking (and the internet) happened, and suddenly multiuser became quite useful again - even at home.

> Modern security can be done better without an OS-level concept of a user.

Perhaps, but I have yet to see a userless model that doesn't have issues on around administrative access control. Even dumb terminals had issues with this where students would change settings and then set the admin password on the terminal... As long as people use computers, users will be users...

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#142

Post by lproven »

guenthert wrote: post #102

> RISC OS gives applications access to much of the memory map, and so if a program accidentally scribbles over the wrong parts of that address space, the whole computer can freeze up – which in testing our Pi 400 did several times. Enough said.

Yep. There are good aspects and bad aspects to old-school 1980s OS design.

On the other hand, the entire PC industry was built on DOS and 16-bit Windows which were exactly like this.

Apple made enough money to buy the dying NeXT from selling classic 68K and PowerPC Macintoshes which were exactly like this.

Early Linux was exactly like this, too. I remember running Red Hat Linux 4.2 on my SPARCstation and having kernel panics right, left and centre. Several a day, every day.

Everything we use today, all the hardware and all the software, was built both on software like this and from software like this.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#143

Post by mikepurvis »

mavhc wrote: post #115
eddd-ddde wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_Technically_ it doesn't have to be. Super user is super user. It can always access anyone's files. Allowing unrestricted access to super user essentially destroys any sense of security. You can very much allow only access to certain commands under super user, e.g. only allow users to run pacman. Of course now you are trusting that said commands won't leak the permissions. I agree that it's a mess. My personal and bi…

https://xkcd.com/1200/

I almost linked that in my ggp comment, but really I’m making the opposite argument as the comic.

Either way you slice it, though, it’s clearly a huge disconnect between what is important to the human using a system vs what is important to the system itself, and the relative lengths gone to to protect those two sets of things.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#144

Post by pjmlp »

josephg wrote: post #119
pjmlp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is another way to call a "user", hence why I used the word indentity instead.

No its not. There's all sorts of stuff you can do with capabilities that are really awkward to even think about with users. Like, when a database starts, you can hand it the capabilities it needs to access a specific directory, listen on a specific port and append (but not read) a specific log file. User based security is usually done by the folder being owned by the database, or an ACL or something. But with capabil…

Capabilites have ownership, ownership requires belonging to something, all the way up to booting the OS.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#145

Post by pjmlp »

josephg wrote: post #122
pjmlp wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capabilites are just another way of doing role management in processes, and require identities for administration anyway. It is yet another way of managing processes identitities.

A capability is not an identity. And the difference matters a great deal in how you build software that takes advantage of capability based security models.

Identity is reflected by who owns the capability.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#146

Post by jnaina »

lproven wrote: post #135
jnaina wrote: post #48

Still remember viewing the Acorn Archimedes with the RISC OS for the first time in 1987, when it was launched. Someone wrote a 10 line demo that rolled down the current screen, using a curl motion using bitmap copy/transform, using Basic. Breathtaking performance/speed. Never knew why it bombed in the marketplace.

> Never knew why it bombed in the marketplace. Bombed? RISC OS machines sold for some 15 years in the face of growing competition from Windows and Linux. Acorn chose to shut it down and span off ARM. Castle Technologies continued selling it and made a new 32-bit-clean version and new hardware for it. RISC OS Developments bought Castle and made RISC OS Apache-licensed FOSS. The OS is still alive and in development nea…

Yes, the Archimedes/RISC OS system itself bombed and got outsold by the PC, Mac, Atari ST and the Amiga.

But the ARM processor/ISA itself that came out of the original ARM2 on Archimedes is now world dominating.

Both are true.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#147

Post by rbanffy »

tech2 wrote: post #92
jl6 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3rd party apps are written (controlled) by other people, and you are effectively granting that 3rd party permission to run their code on your device, so the user concept isn’t that far off the mark. Since ~nobody reads the source code of 3rd party apps, security vetting is usually a matter of deciding to trust the app’s author, same as how you would trust anyone else that you give a user account to.

You grant them capabilities, a handle which permits access to a particular directory, one which allows network access (or possibly even further limited than that) etc. No user, just a series of object handles which permit them to perform the task and nothing more.

That sounds like just brutally quartering users into their granular permissions. ;-)

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#148

Post by rbanffy »

ajb wrote: post #7

It was ahead of its time in UX, but rather behind in the foundations. It's a single user system with no real security, and there was no system of shared libraries - to share code between applications, it was usual to put the shared code in a kernel module and call the kernel. Even the standard C library worked this way. Amusingly, when you invoked the system console -which was at a lower level than the gui system, ef…

It’s a bit like what happens when you hit Stop-A on a Sun workstation, but in that case you are dropped to the basement under the OS.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#149

Post by rbanffy »

repelsteeltje wrote: post #127
xyzzy3000 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acorn bought-in a couple of GUIs for RISC iX (Motif mwm/twm in later versions, X.desktop from IXI Ltd in the earlier release), but I'm not sure if any were exclusive, and none looked like the RISC OS GUI - I wouldn't characterise anything about the RISC iX GUI as being particularly 'Archimedes'. There's a video of someone playing around with the GUIs here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r7vgQsuoT4 If only it had be…

Ah yes, Motif! Now I remember, I stand corrected. Before Gnome, Qt, KDE we of course had motif and X with it's license issues. If I remember correctly, early Slackware CD bundles came with motif as well.

There was a free implementation called “lesstif” IIRC. Motif was proprietary until much later, as was CDE.

IXI’s desktop runs on top of Motif.

Re: Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

#150

Post by rbanffy »

lproven wrote: post #133
repelsteeltje wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the Archimedes GUI on top of the BSD kernel? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX I have memories of drooling over those R series machines or anything MIPS/Sparc/Alpha based in the early 90s for that matter. I think ARM systems at the time were never competitive in terms of speed (compared to SUN, SGI, HP), but they were Archimedes' sexy sisters.

[Article author here] > You mean the Archimedes GUI on top of the BSD kernel? No. (Although that sounds fun, I never heard of such a thing.) RISC/ix was Acorn's ARM UNIX. It had nothing of the Acorn GUI -- it was fairly standard X11, I think with Motif or something Motif-like. Acorn did add some Acornish tweaks to it, including its text editing and its memory allocation, but it looked and ran much like any other late…

I still think it’d be fun to bring it back to life. I don’t think there are many copies still usable and it was picky about hardware - it wouldn’t run on more modern Acorn boxes.
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