Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 239 posts

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#151

Post by mananaysiempre »

dgxyz wrote: post #78
mananaysiempre wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good. In their intended applications, which might or might not be the ones you need. The slowness of the filesystem that necessitated a whole custom caching layer in Git for Windows, or the slowness of process creation that necessitated adding “picoprocesses” to the kernel so that WSL1 would perform acceptably and still wasn’t enough for it to survive, those a…

This is on the mark. But there's another issue which is what cripples windows for dev! NTFS has a terrible design flaw which is the fact that small files, under 640 bytes, are stored in the MFT. The MFT ends up having serious lock contention so lots of small file changes are slow. This screws up anything Unixy and git horribly. WSL1 was built on top of that problem which was one of the many reasons it was slow as mol…

> NTFS has a terrible design flaw which is the fact that small files, under 640 bytes, are stored in the MFT.

Ext4 also stores small (~150B) files inside the inode[1], and so do a number of other filesystems[2]? NTFS was unusually early to the party, but if you’re right that it’s problematic there then something else must also be wrong (perhaps with the locking?) to make it so.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/ext4/inli...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#All..., the “Inline data” column.

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#153

Post by blackqueeriroh »

RoyTyrell wrote: post #58
portly wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read this type of (sour) comment more and more on this forum. To me it reads very cynical and I wonder what the author is trying to say with this. Are you perhaps negatively impacted by automatic coding?

Nope, not at all. I read your comment as ignorant to AI's capabilities and their negative outcomes with relying on vibe coding. The implication is that MS is forcing AI adoption on users at a point of absurd recklessness, and that they should not be trusted - especially not blindly trusted. Perhaps the reason you're seeing comments similar to my original comment more frequently is because actual software engineers wh…

Can you define “non-technical folks” for me? Because last I checked there are a LOT of “technical” people who aren’t software engineers, and a lot of “non-technical” people who don’t believe software is “kinda easy to do.”

It’s really frustrating to see comments like this with absolutely zero sourcing, but just stated as fact.

It’s giving “I saw ads on LinkedIn and it made me anxious about a world where I can’t make six figures being in control of what tools people have access to”

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#154

Post by mananaysiempre »

p_ing wrote: post #148
mananaysiempre wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, by “file system” here I mean all of the layers between the application talking in terms of named files and whatever first starts talking in terms of block addresses. Also, as far as my (very limited) understanding goes, there are more architectural performance problems than just filters (and, to me, filters don’t necessarily sound like performance bankruptcy, provided the filter in question isn’t mandatory, un…

NTFS will perform directory B+-tree lookups (this is where it walks the path) until it finds the requested file. The Cache Manager caches these B+-trees. From there, it hits the MFT, finds the specific record for the file, loads the MFT record, and ultimately returns the FILE_OBJECT to the I/O Manager and it bubbles up the chain back to (presumably) Win32. The MFT is just a linear array of records, which include file…

Thanks for the explanation! Linux, meanwhile, will[1] in the normal case walk a sequence[2] of hash tables (representing incomplete but up-to-date views of directories) before hitting the filesystem’s vtable or the block I/O layer at all, and on the fast path[3] taking no locks other than the RCU read lock.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/path-look...

[2] I was under the impression that it could look up an entire path at once when I wrote my grandparent comment; it seems I was wrong, which on reflection makes sense given you can move directories.

[3] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/path-look...

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#155

Post by cgfjtynzdrfht »

ssl-3 wrote: post #146
9dev wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hadn’t. Windows 11 has them, due to support for new hardware mitigation features. What is it you don’t understand in particular?

There's a lot here that is hard to understand: > > What is missing here that was present when this same computer was running Windows 10? > All the security features I listed in the comment above.

[dead]

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#156

Post by RajT88 »

joe_mamba wrote: post #88
RajT88 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talked about back in the Vista days publicly (I cannot find the articles now) - Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing. So they are not incentivized to keep Win32_Lean_N_Mean, but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11. I have no insider knowledge here, just this is a thing which get talked about around major Windows releas…

>Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing. Citation needed since that makes no logical sense. You want to sell your SW product to the most common denominator to increase your sales, not to a market of HW that people don't yet have. Sounds like FUD. >but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11 They're not artificial. POPCNT / S…

You are just arguing the requirements are the requirements.

Are they as important as stated? Microsoft says so. Everyone here loves and trusts them, right?

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#157

Post by aseipp »

newsoftheday wrote: post #72
loufe wrote: post #27

The lack of integrated sandboxing in windows compared to android/iphone is still frankly unacceptable. I've become increasingly paranoid about running any application on Windows (not that your average linux distro is even remotely better) and yet Apple and Google seem to be far, far ahead in user permissions (especially with GrapheneOS, god bless that team) and isolation of processes. Consumers and businesses deserve…

> I've become increasingly paranoid about running any application on Windows (not that your average linux distro is even remotely better) Linux excels over Windows in the area of security by a wide margin, I have no qualms about running an app on Linux versus Windows, any day of the week.

No, Windows has consistently been ahead of Linux for many years in terms of average-user desktop security, from binary hardening to designs like secure desktop, because average Windows users do not typically have curated software selections, so you assume the worst. (When I wrote the original "binary hardening via compiler flags" RFC for NixOS over 10 years ago, almost everything in it was already done on Windows and had been for years.) It's still not ideal; macOS takes it even further and actually allows things like "storing secrets on disk in a way that can't be read by random programs" because it can e.g. make policy decisions based on code signatures, which are widely deployed. None of this exists in pretty much any Linux distro; you can literally just impersonate password prompts, simply override 'sudo' in a user's shell to capture their password silently, copy every file in $HOME/.config to your evil server, setuid by its very definition is an absolute atrocity, etc. Linux distros make it easy for people to live in their own chosen curated software set, but the security calculus changes when people want to run arbitrary and non-curated software.

You can make a pretty reasonably secure Linux server by doing your homework, it's nowhere close to impossible. An extremely secure server also requires a bit of hardware homework. The Linux desktop, however, is woefully behind macOS and Windows in terms of security by a pretty large margin, and most of it is by design.

(In theory you can probably bolt a macOS-like system onto Linux using tools like SCM_RIGHTS/pidfds/code signatures, along with delegated privilege escalation, no setuid, signature-based policy mechanisms, etc. But there are a lot of cultural and software challenges to overcome to make it all widely usable.)

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#158

Post by magicalhippo »

joe_mamba wrote: post #88
RajT88 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talked about back in the Vista days publicly (I cannot find the articles now) - Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing. So they are not incentivized to keep Win32_Lean_N_Mean, but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11. I have no insider knowledge here, just this is a thing which get talked about around major Windows releas…

>Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing. Citation needed since that makes no logical sense. You want to sell your SW product to the most common denominator to increase your sales, not to a market of HW that people don't yet have. Sounds like FUD. >but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11 They're not artificial. POPCNT / S…

> You want to sell your SW product to the most common denominator to increase your sales, not to a market of HW that people don't yet have.

A key difference between regular software and Windows is that almost nobody buys Windows, they get it pre-installed on a new PC. So a new PC purchase means a new Windows license.

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#159

Post by Rapzid »

p_ing wrote: post #148
mananaysiempre wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, by “file system” here I mean all of the layers between the application talking in terms of named files and whatever first starts talking in terms of block addresses. Also, as far as my (very limited) understanding goes, there are more architectural performance problems than just filters (and, to me, filters don’t necessarily sound like performance bankruptcy, provided the filter in question isn’t mandatory, un…

NTFS will perform directory B+-tree lookups (this is where it walks the path) until it finds the requested file. The Cache Manager caches these B+-trees. From there, it hits the MFT, finds the specific record for the file, loads the MFT record, and ultimately returns the FILE_OBJECT to the I/O Manager and it bubbles up the chain back to (presumably) Win32. The MFT is just a linear array of records, which include file…

Heh, first I've heard of Windows Internals. New friends for The Linux Programming Interface!

Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

#160

Post by sharts »

trimethylpurine wrote: post #111
replooda wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The criticism was directed at the company's product, not the employees...

The response appears to be pointing out that with so many employees (engineers), it's unlikely that they all work on Windows.

Don’t the best of the best typically work on OS fundamentals though?
Post reply on HN