Re: Ada-inspired OS/Language

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca>]

Ryan wrote:
> An article on Slashdot reads
> (http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/18/2053259)
...
> "BRiX, unlike other modern operating systems, does not use hardware to 
> isolate and protect applications from each other. Instead, it uses a 
> single address space and relies on a safe-language to generate code that 
> will not access memory for which it does not own. 

Here we go again.. another DOS-like, memory wide open to corruption
concept. PC's eventually, with the help of 286 and later got to the
point where they could protect processes. Now we've regressed with
the palms etc., back to this no-protection model. No matter how good
the language is, there will always be occaisions where one process
steps on another unless it is prevented from doing so in hardware.

This is OK for research. Not good for running systems that must
run as firewalls, or central hosts to university students!

This model has been tried before BTW, with hardware protection
(each process just has system wide unique addresses for memory
objects). IIRC, one such system was called Opal.

This language also
> handles many checks at compile-time that would be performed at run-time 
> in other operating systems."
> 
> What effect might this have on the development of AdaOS?  Competition? 
> Inspiration?  It seems to have several of the same goals in mind.
> 
> Ryan

IMHO, I don't think it amounts to anything more than a research effort.
I can't see the world going to a less secure model (ie. no hardware
memory protection), after seeing all the fighting with the security
problems we already have in a more secure environment.

I think there is a vast amount of work that could be done in the
interest of a secure host O/S, that is [mostly?] immune to DOS
attacks that can be launched by guest university accounts, for
example.

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg