OT: Can We Make OSes Reliable and Secure

[Sy Ali]

As an aside, one thing which piques my interest with regards to
stability and security is  the idea of jailing or otherwise carving up
the system's resources into virtualized machines.

If I'm not mistaken, Heretix and GoboLinux throw applications in a
sort of jail, at least for installation purposes, so that they can't
place files outside of defined areas.

Virtual machines takes that a step further by doing that also with
memory and such.

Jails are really cool and this topic is on my list of stuff to learn.

I think that security and stability can be achieved not only by
looking at the OS itself but also on how applications are stored and
run.

So one avenue for improvement would be changes to the OS and its
tools.  Another avenue is through virtualization and jails and the
like.  I like the avenue suggested in the article.. where a programing
language itself is designed around "safe" concepts.  I still think
jailing/virtualizing is necessary because people will want to run old
"untrusted" applications without rewriting/recompiling them.


I remember windows 95 touting that it was more stable because a
misbehaving application couldn't take down other applications.  This
was a real selling point (umm, a real pirating point?) for people who
tried to make windows 3.1 run multiple applications.


I personally would be willing to take a mere 10% hit on performance
(however _that_ is defined.. heh) for "stability".  I'd be willing to
take 50% or more to be able to better manager and trust my computer.
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