What would happen if we will write a new OS from scratch right now? can we do it better? can we improve security and robustness? can we prevent unexpe

Operating Systems Are More Exciting Than You Think

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2021-09-18 11:30:07

What would happen if we will write a new OS from scratch right now? can we do it better? can we improve security and robustness? can we prevent unexpected interactions between applications?

These are the type of questions that the Microsoft Research team was trying to answer around 18 years ago and it was then when they came up with a pretty cool name for their new OS — Singularity.

The quite surprising part is that all SIPs and the kernel are running in the same address space which also means user code runs with full hardware privileges.

Isn’t it totally counter-intuitive? we just mentioned that we want to improve security as one of our goals and this change seems to make it worse.

Each SIP is actually sealed — They can’t be modified from outside. There’s no shared memory between different SIPs, no signals, only explicit IPC. There are also no code modifications from within — no JIT, class loaders, dynamic libraries.

We can think of channels as capabilities. Each SIP can have multiple channels that through them we can create IPC(inter-process communication). For Example, an open file is a channel received from the file server. If a SIP gets this channel it means that it has permission to access it.

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