Hacker News Reader

Comment by cannonedhamster | Hacker News Reader

This basically just came across as a GNU/linux hit piece. In my admittedly really limited knowledge wouldn't multiple vectors into the kernel introduce more surface area for attackers? The other problem with this is when is Google going to get bored with it and move on to something else? If they are willing to jettison Android they are willing to jettison anything. Also the line about GNU/linux only caring about servers seems to ignore the amazing amount of work that's gone into KDE, Gnome, Ubuntu, Kali Linux, Mint, etc. all of which are desktop focused and in the past few years have really started to catch up feature wise. Yes obviously there are still issues, and realistically there always will be issues. Windows and MacOS/iOS have issues with thousands of paid programmers why wouldn't a distro built by hundred of part time workers with only a portion of them paid to work just on the OS?

View on HN

Microkernels are often used in high-security/high-criticality use cases because the kernel's facilities are very limited and the surface area is very small (thus easier to reason about and assure). Most complex functionality is performed in isolated processes/tasks with known IPC boundaries (i.e. a random thing can't clobber or inspect the memory of everything else).

We build on top of seL4 for these reasons (among others).

> We build on top of seL4 for these reasons (among others).

Who's we? I too am down with OTP, especially OTP on seL4. ;- )

I believe they're PolySync [0], and I believe they might be referencing "fel4" a Rust-atop seL4 [1] that they've developed which is very cool stuff.

[0] https://polysync.io/

[1] https://github.com/PolySync/libsel4-sys

Formally of, yes. Now some folks are doing all new things.

Can you elaborate?

https://www.auxon.io

Site is just a contact form.

Well thanks, I don't know what I was expecting when I clicked the link anyways.

Indeed. We haven't invested in expanding our public-facing presence yet.

I was just answering the "Who's we?" question.

Probably the easiest frame to think about what we're doing is building engineering automation products for systems & robotics engineers.

We ultimately want to do for those classes of engineers what things like CAD, FEA, EDA, etc. did previously for mechanical & electrical engineers in terms of managing complexity and amplifying their capabilities.

Sounds like a fun project!

Isn't seL4's multicore support either unverified or limited (i.e. shared memory is forbidden)? Is your platform single-threaded then?

But they haven't shown to be willing to jettison Android. In fact, they're bringing it to more platforms(ChromeOS) and almost certainly they would bring it to Fuchsia.

They are bringing ART to Fuchsia.

It didn't come across as a hit piece but rather as a comparison with overly colorful language, like that stuff about being in the boiler room.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com