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No More Blue Fridays

brendangregg.com

281–282 of 282 posts

Re: No More Blue Fridays

#281
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...just like they did with Kerberos! And just like with Kerberos they'll define a standard then refuse to follow it . Instead, they will implement subtle changes to the Windows implementation that make solutions that use Windows eBPF incompatible with anything else, making it much more difficult to write software that works with all platforms eBPF (or even just its output). Everything's gotta be different in Windows…

This to me ascribes way too much to mustache-twirling villainy at Microsoft, but to me fails to account for the fact that engineers surely make many of these implementation-detail decisions. These engineers aren’t incentivized to create lock-in. I think it’s more likely that sometimes for a feature to play well with other existing parts of the Windows ecosystem, compromises are made to the standards-compliance. Micro…

> These engineers aren’t incentivized to create lock-in.

Ever heard of something called “money”?

> I think it’s more likely that sometimes for a feature to play well with other existing parts of the Windows ecosystem, compromises are made to the standards-compliance.

So you're basically saying that you're too young to remember the “good” old days of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, right...?

Re: No More Blue Fridays

#282
post #198

WebAssembly is a better choice for sandboxing kernel code. It has a full formal specification with a mechanized proof of type safety, many high-performance implementations, broad toolchain support, is targetable from many languages, and a capability security model.

Hardly. For starters, wasm doesn’t guarantee that a piece of code terminates in bound time. There are further security guarantees in ebpf such as any lock acquired must be released.

The eBPF termination checker is buggy anyway; you cannot rely on it.
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