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Comment by esjeon | Hacker News Reader

Attestation is a critical feature for many H/W companies (e.g. IoT, robotics), and they struggle with finding security engineers who expertise in this area (disclaimer: I used to work as a operating system engineer + security engineer). Many distros are not only designed for desktop users, but also for industrial uses. If distros ship standardized packages in this area, it would help those companies a lot.

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This is the problem with Linux in general. It's way too much infiltrated by our adversaries from big tech industry.

Look at all the kernel patch submissions. 90% are not users but big tech drones. Look at the Linux foundation board. It's the who's who of big tech.

This is why I moved to the BSDs. Linux started as a grassroots project but turned commercial, the BSDs started commercial but are hardly still used as such and are mostly user driven now (yes there's a few exceptions like netflix, netgate, ix etc but nothing on the scale of huawei, Amazon etc)

> This is why I moved to the BSDs. Linux started as a grassroots project but turned commercial

Thanks, this may be the key takeaway from this discussion for me

Linux has been majority developed by large tech companies for the last 20+ years. If not for them, it would not be anywhere close to where it is today. You may not like this fact, but it's not really a new development nor something that can be described as infiltration. At the end of the day, maintaining software without being paid to do so is not generally sustainable.

Considering some of the changes to the ecosystem in the last 20 years it's not clear that this has made things better.

It is very clear that this has made things better

A lot more programs are available for linux, drivers and subsystems have gotten better, more features that benefit everyone (such as eBPF) and more

As a complete guess, I would say that 90% of Linux systems are run by "big tech drones". And also by small companies using technology.

Open source operating systems are not a zero sum game. Yes there is a certain gravitational pull from all the work contributed by the big companies. If you aren't contributing "for-hire", then you choose what you want to work on, and what you want to use.

Only if you count Android phones as being run by Google ... which is exactly the problem we want to avoid with our PCs.

> Attestation is a critical feature for many H/W companies

Like John Deere. Read about how they use that sort of thing

IoT and robotics should (dare I say "must"?) not use general-purpose OSes at all.

This «Linux have a finger in every pie» attitude is very harmful for industry, IMHO.

I agree but it's difficult to argue against it. There is just so much you get for free by starting with a Linux distro as your base. Developing against alternatives is very expensive and developing something new is even more expensive. The best we can hope for is that someone with deep pockets invests in good alternatives that everyone can benefit from.

Why shouldn't they use the kernel, systemd, and a few core utilities? Why reinvent the wheel? There's nothing requiring them to pull in a typical desktop userspace.

Because different tasks requires different trade-offs and Linux has only one set of trade-offs. You cannot do good universal tool. It is like Leatherman, good enough to fix-up your bike on the side of the road, not so for normal workshop.

You say: reinvent the wheel.

I say: use pickup truck for every task, from farming to racing to commuting moving goods across continent. Is it possible? Of course. Is it good idea? I don't think so.

All cars are the same if you squint enough, wheels, engine, some frame, some controls, which are not very different between even F1 car and 18-wheel truck.

General purpose operating systems are fine and in some cases, preferable. However, they should be small, simple and designed with first class portability. Linux is none of those.

How are you defining "general-purpose OS"? Are you saying IoT and robotics shouldn't use a Linux kernel at all? Or just not your general purpose distros? I would be interested to hear more of your logic here, since it seems like using the same FOSS operating system across various uses provides a lot of value to everyone.

I think, that I want at least hard-real-time OS in any computer which can move physical objects. Linux kernel cannot be it: hard RTOS cannot have virtual memory (mapping walks is unpredictable in case of TLB miss) and many other mechanisms which are desired in desktop/server OS are ill-suited for RTOS. Scheduler must be tuned differently, I/O must be done differently. It is not only «this process have RT priority, don't preempt it», it is design of whole kernel.

Better, this OS must be verified (as seL4). But I understand, that it is pipe dream. Heck, even RTOS is pipe dream.

About IoT: this word means nothing. Is connected TV IoT? I have no problems with Linux inside it. My lightbulb which can be turned on and off via ZigBee? Why do I need Linux here? My battery-powered weather station (because I cannot put 220v wiring in backyard)? Better no, I need as-low-power-as-possible solution.

To be honest, O think even using one kernel for different servers is technically wrong, because RDBMS, file server and computational node needs very different priories in kernel tuning too. I prefer network stack of FreeBSD, file server capabilities (native ZFS & Ko) of Solaris, transaction processing of Tandem/HPE NonStop OS and Wayland/GPU/Desktop support of Linux. But everything bar Linux is effectively dead. And Linux is only «good enough» in everything, mediocre.

I understand value of unification, but as engineer I'm sad.

I'm not too big in this field but didn't many of those same IOT companies and the like struggle with the packages becoming dependent on Poeterings work since they often needed much smaller/minimal distros?

I don't think this is generally true. If you are running Linux in your stack, your device probably is investing in 1GiB+ RAM and 2GiB+ of flash storage. systemd et al are not a problem at that point. Running a UI will end up being considerably more costly.

I can assure you there are many Linux devices with specs significantly lower than that.

Sure, but devices that do that are not running a Linux distro off the shelf. They are creating something custom with the minimal amount of dependencies possible.

I work on embedded devices, fairly powerful ones to be fair, and I think systemd is really great, useful software. There's a ton of stuff I can do quite easily with systemd that would take a ton of effort to do reliably with sysvinit.

It's definitely pretty opinionated, and I frequently have to explain to people why "After=" doesn't mean "Wants=", but the result is way more robust than any alternative I'm familiar with.

If you're on a system so constrained that running systemd is a burden, you are probably already using something like buildroot/yocto and have a high degree of control about what init system you use.

Then they can go and buy some other OS like VxWorks.

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