Comment by stinkbeetle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stinkbeetle | Hacker News Reader

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cgroups first came from resource management frameworks that IIRC came out of IBM and got into some distro kernels for a time but not upstream.

Namespaces were not an attempt to add security, but just grew out of work to make interfaces more flexible, like bind mounts. And Unix security is fundamentally good, not having namespaces isn't much of a point against it in the first place, but now it does have them.

And it's going pretty well indeed. All applications use many kernel features, and we do have very secure high performance web and other servers.

L4 systems have been around for as long as Linux, and SEL4 in particular for 2 decades. They haven't moved the needle much so I'd say it's not really going all that well for them so far. SEL4 is a great project that has done some important things don't get me wrong, but it doesn't seem to be a unix replacement poised for a coup.

> Unix security is fundamentally good

L. Ron Hubbard is fundamentally good!

I kid, but seriously, good how? Because it ensures cybersecurity engineers will always have a job?

seL4 is not the final answer, but something close to it absolutely will be. Capability-based security is an irreducible concept at a mathematical level, meaning you can’t do better than it, at best you can match it, and its certainly not matched by anything else we’ve discovered in this space.

> good how?

Good because it is simple both in terms of understanding it and implementing it, and sufficient in a lot of cases.

> seL4 is not the final answer, but something close to it absolutely will be. Capability-based security is an irreducible concept at a mathematical level, meaning you can’t do better than it, at best you can match it, and its certainly not matched by anything else we’ve discovered in this space.

Security is not pure math though, it's systems and people and systems of people.

cgroups are from Google. https://lwn.net/Articles/199643/

Yes but I don't see how you are addressing what I wrote. What are you getting at?

Oh, maybe my first post was poorly worded. cgroups used ideas about resource management that came from IBM, who had resource maangement before Google was a company and their CKRM was an earlier proposal. For whatever reason, cgroups won. But they also mostly came about due to Google's internal resource management, not so much security.

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