I find the idea of a modern practically usable OS really exciting, so this is awesome!
It says "Drivers run in Userspace" on the front page of Redox - what is the advantage of this? I don't know too much about drivers.
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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The advantage is that drivers are isolated in separate processes with fewer permissions.
The two big benefits are security and stability.
The traditional approach is to have drivers run in kernel space. If there ends up being an issue, it could crash the entire system instead of just the relevant process. From the security side of things, in the traditional drivers are run with the highest set of security capabilities. A flaw in a driver that allows, say code execution, would run that code as a high privileged user (usually a system user root in the case of *nix). Running then in her space dramatically lowers the impact of exploitation.
Looking forward to try Redox one day. Rustlang is the future.
I hope apps in this new OS can be just a single file package which can be downloaded and run. That's one major thing which MacOS (and Windows to some extent) got right. Package managers on Linux are a premature optimization dependency hell..
The Linux distribution packages suffer from dependency hell because the C and C++ dependency management is manual, there's no good dependency manager on the C and C++ programming languages.
While the Rust programming language has automatic dependency management with Cargo, the best dependency manager in the history of computing.