Genode's Browser Odyssey (2022)

https://genodians.org/nfeske/2022-01-27-browser-odyssey

by dannyobrien • 3 years ago

60 11 3 years ago

genodians.org

snvzz3• 3 years ago

Genode is awesome in general.

pyinstallwoes• 3 years ago

Can you expand on that? Why? What’s cool?

snvzz3• 3 years ago

The architecture. I do not know any other examples of modular dynamic systems based on capabilities.

Genode does it successfully, and the formally verified seL4 microkernel is one of the kernels they support.

The systems most of us use are now legacy, as Genode proves it can be done fundamentally better.

qalter• 3 years ago

About Genode: https://genode.org/about/index

General overview: https://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/index

Genode is based on a recursive system structure. Each program runs in a dedicated sandbox and gets granted only those access rights and resources that are needed for its specific purpose. Programs can create and manage sub-sandboxes out of their own resources, thereby forming hierarchies where policies can be applied at each level. The framework provides mechanisms to let programs communicate with each other and trade their resources, but only in strictly-defined manners. Thanks to this rigid regime, the attack surface of security-critical functions can be reduced by orders of magnitude compared to contemporary operating systems.

mananaysiempre• 3 years ago

It’s a multiserver OS on top of a microkernel, what almost everyone in the academic community of the 90s assumed would be the future of single-computer systems (see e.g. the Tanenbaum—Torvalds debate[1]). The security framework at runtime is capabilities[2,3] (“object-capabilities”, not the weird draft POSIX thing) as opposed to ACLs; that is, you can access an object to the exact extent that you can name it, and those names are system-mediated and unforgeable (POSIX fds are capabilities; POSIX filenames are not; public Google Docs links kind of are in that it’s infeasible to guess them).

Basically, this is mainstream thinking as of the last point researchers seriously thought about single-machine OSes, sometime in the early 00s. And unlike most products of that thinking, it’s a fairly complete desktop system that can do a fair amount of desktop things. At the very least, it’s a proof by construction that this approach can actually serve as the foundation for a practical system.

(Hardware support sucks, of course, but with hardware manufacturers guarding their docs more closely than their genitals it’s a miracle you can actually get any PCs to work at all without Microsoft’s clout.)

[1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/appa.html

[2] http://cap-lore.com/CapTheory/

[3] http://erights.org/elib/capability/index.html

wcerfgba• 3 years ago

I've not come across Genode before but it looks cool. Is anyone using this as a primary OS? Can anyone comment on the usability?

snvzz3• 3 years ago

The developers have been using it as their primary OS for years, now.

It has 3d acceleration. It has a modern webbrowser. It has virtualbox, where you can run Linux to then run any misc program which doesn't in Genode yet.

webmobdev• 3 years ago

If they liked working on Qt, I wonder why they didn't consider porting Sailfish Browser - https://github.com/sailfishos/sailfish-browser - based on Gecko?

Genode's Browser Odyssey (2022)

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