For others as lost as I am and want the tl;dr:
A library OS is an operating system design where traditional OS services are provided as application-linked libraries, rather than a single, shared kernel serving all the programs.
Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
91–100 of 239 posts
Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#92Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#93Copilot https://github.com/microsoft/litebox/blob/main/.github/copil...
> Extremely simple changes do not require explicit unit tests.
I haven't used Copilot much, because people keep saying how bad it is, but generally if you add escape hatches like this without hard requirements of when the LLM can take them, they won't follow that rule in a intuitive way most of the time.
Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#94Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good. This. A while ago a build of Win 11 was shared/leaked that was tailored for the Chinese government called "Windows G" and it had all the ads, games, telemetry, anti-malware and other bullshit removed and it flew on 4GB RAM. So Microsoft CAN DO IT, if they actually want to, they just don't want to for users. You can get something similar yourself at home r…
Never heard of Windows G .. that sounds exactly what I want for my older Thinkpads :-)
> Windows G .. sounds exactly what I want for my older Thinkpads
I'm running 11 IoT Ent LTSC on a some T420; it runs pretty okay.
Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#96With how buggy their flagship OS has become, why would I trust anything else they release to be better? Or even if it does work well now, why should I expect it to stay that way? Microsoft has burned through all possible goodwill at this point, at least for me.
Microsoft employ over 100,000 engineers. I'd advise against assuming that everything produced by any of them is bad because of bugs in Windows.
This is also still small/unimportant enough not to be poisoned by their broken corporate culture.
Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#97Earlier 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 not due to slowness of the file system. Native ntfs tools are much faster than Unix ones in some situations. The issue is that running Unix software on windows will naturally have a performance impact. You see the same thing in reverse using Wine on Linux. Windows uses a different design for IO so requires software to be written with that design in mind.
It's pretty typical these days for software, particularly games of the DX9-11 eras to perform better on Wine/Proton then they do under native Windows on the same hardware.
Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't supposed to replace Windows, and it isn't a GUI desktop operating system at all. I doubt anyone working on this has anything to do with the modern Windows desktop UX.
but if the host OS is already comprised, what is the point of sandbox inside of it?
Maybe we need secure attestation for sandbox to be protected against compromised host :)
It does sound hard, and might need to employ homomorphic encryption with hw help for any memory access after code has been also verifiably unaltered through (uncompromised) hw attestation.
Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#99I know we're not supposed to complain about comment quality, but -- I came here to look for interesting technical analysis but instead it's Slashdot level snipes about Microsoft the company. And yes, I also dislike Windows and Microsoft generally but this looks like a very interesting project and I'm frankly frustrated at the level of discussion here, it's juvenile. This has nothing to do with Windows, and it looks like most people didn't even read past the title.
I'll play with this later today after work and see how mature it is and hopefully have something concrete and constructive to say. Hopefully others will, too.
Re: Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good. This. A while ago a build of Win 11 was shared/leaked that was tailored for the Chinese government called "Windows G" and it had all the ads, games, telemetry, anti-malware and other bullshit removed and it flew on 4GB RAM. So Microsoft CAN DO IT, if they actually want to, they just don't want to for users. You can get something similar yourself at home r…
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…
If anything, Microsoft has a lot of problems because they support a wide variety of crappy hardware and allow just about anyone to write kernel level sw (drivers). Not sure if this changed, but they used to run in the ring0 even.
This was most evident back in the 90s when they shipped NT4: extremely stable as opposed to Win95 which introduced the infamous BSOD. But it supported everything, and NT4 had HW support on par with Linux (i.e. almost nothing from the cheap vendors).