- One of his dumber takes. Virtualization replaces an ultra-functional general-purpose kernel evolved over decades to support every conceivable application with a drastically smaller "kernel" (KVM and the userland hypervisor). It's a drastic attack surface reduction, and the empirical data bears that out: kernel LPEs aren't even newsworthy (there's whole repos full of unnamed, unremarked-upon LPEs), and KVM escapes are very rare.
- Doesn't that message date back to a time that either predates or is almost concurrent with the introduction of x86 hardware-assisted virtualization? I wasn't around playing with VMs back then, but I'm not sure that the track record of x86 virtualization 20 years ago was that great.
- It does, but that's an argument about implementations, and his comment is an argument about design. Just read it again and see if you think it's reasonable. Pay attention to the tone and (especially) the conclusory certainty he deploys.
- And since then, OpenBSD has developed its own VM subsystem vmm(4), vmd(8), vmctl(8).
- Sure, I mean, he was wrong, and I assume he knows he's wrong, and wouldn't say the same thing today. He's not dumb. Just this take is.
- I’ll take someone who’s dumb over someone who is smart but rudely and confidently incorrect any day. Modesty, thoughtfulness, and kindness are too-undervalued virtues in our business.
- The letter is dated 2007-10.
AMD released (ie commercially available) Pacifica on May 23, 2006 while Intel did released their Vanderpool a half of year earlier November 14, 2005. [0]
Windows Server 2008 was RTM'ed on February 2008 which provided Hyper-V as a first class component. [1]
Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 added support for both Intel VT (IVT) and AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) and was released 11 June 2007. [2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#AMD_virtual...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2008
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Virtual_Server#Versi...
- > replaces an ultra-functional general-purpose kernel evolved over decades to support every conceivable application with a drastically smaller "kernel"
Is a Proxmox kernel that much smaller than a typical Linux kernel?
- Isn't Proxmox a management layover over Debian and KVM? I doubt the kernel is even smaller.
- I don't know. I don't use Proxmox.
- How big is the OpenBSD kernel and userland actually compared to a virtualization layer?
- If someone purposely dug up emails you wrote 19 years ago, I'm sure they'd find some of your "dumber takes" as well.
I'm not sure what the purpose of revisiting this is beyond provoking a flamewar on a slow Sunday.
- > If someone purposely dug up emails you wrote 19 years ago, I'm sure they'd find some of your "dumber takes" as well.
"Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I will find something in them which will hang him."
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_the_man_and_I_will_giv...
- I mean, I agree there. We all have dumb takes! I hear roughly once a month about my old "I don't think Dual EC is a backdoor, it's too dumb and obvious for anyone to actually use it" take.
- Probably people are responding less to the dumbness of the take and more the arrogance of the tone combined with the dumbness of the take. Everyone has dumb takes, not everyone is an asshole while giving their dumb takes.
Regardless i do agree with you though, not sure what the point of digging up ancient skeletons is.
- I'm anti virtualization, but mostly due to the internal complexities of the guest applications being swept under the rug, it's undeniable that the host is protected and thus neighbouring guests (of course it is with almost 20 years of hindsight I can say this.)
That the hypervisor is effectively an operating system/kernel I have always held, and that it is a smaller and thus less vulnerable kernel is an appropriate explication I think. It's very hard to secure an all purpose kernel like Linux without actually building it yourself (and even then..)
- "Torvalds, via e-mail, says De Raadt is “difficult” and declined to comment further."
https://www.forbes.com/2005/06/16/linux-bsd-unix-cz_dl_0616t...
Imagine being so hard you're labelled as "difficult" by no other but Linus Torvalds
- Thanks for sharing the forbes link. From the link:
"De Raadt says BSD could have become the world's most popular open source operating system, except that a lawsuit over BSD scared away developers, who went off to work on Linux and stayed there even after BSD was deemed legal."
There is some truth to that. And who knows where BSDs might have been if the lawsuit never happened.
However, I think Linux has always has and till today has better leadership, and management compared to OpenBSD.
I also think GPLv2 was another good that happened to Linux. It just creates an irresistible force to contribute back. With *BSD, a company might contribute back or it may not.
- Ha! That’s some rose-colored-glasses view of BSD history.
The lawsuit didn’t help. But the BSD developers shot themselves in the foot when they refused to support x86, referring to it as a “toy”.
It wasn't until Linux came along and started eating up all of BSD's user base that they freaked out and decided x86 support might be a good idea. But by then it was too late.
- I don't recall them refusing to support x86, but BSD development was mostly done by academics rewriting and improving AT&T UNIX, which was mostly on big iron systems of the time. They were focused on academic computer science work. The lawsuits stopped a lot of BSD work as the universities were sorting it all out. William and Lynne Jolitz start porting 4.3BSD to the Intel 80386 at Berkeley in 1989 (but the code wasn't released for years due to said lawsuit) before Linux existed. That is the first BSD-on-x86 work; by December 1990 they had contributed a working port to UCB. Most of the code didn't see the light of day until ~1992.
Also, usable and production ready BSDs were running large websites on x86 long before linux became mainstream and well-supported enough to be used. The BSD TCP/IP stack was the reference implementation for ages and BSD was heavily used in the internet's early days as a lot of early companies spun out of Californian universities. Hotmail ran on FreeBSD. Early SunOS variants were based off of BSD, as were some other commercial unixes.
The bigger killer, I think, is that BSD was (and still has) a bit of closed mindset to newcomers and were and are more conservative to new technology, despite some foundations of techbeing started with them. Docker's origins can be directly traced to FreeBSD jails. Sometimes the conservatism is warranted and a benefit (eg OpenSSH).
- I go back to take a look at the BSDs every now and then and frankly it really looks like that mindset has stayed, somehow.
Generally speaking the BSDs seems really fork-a-phobic and it kinda shows given how little dynamism is there in the development those systems.
Even the Solaris derivatives have a faster tempo.
- > But the BSD developers shot themselves in the foot when they refused to support x86, referring to it as a “toy”.
When was that? Presumably wwaaaaaaaay before 386BSD was a thing right?
- 386BSD came out about the right time, but as noted, development was slow, and the original author abandoned it pretty quickly while at the same time Linux was actively gaining traction and growing rapidly.
Quotes below:
[1] https://www.doc-reform.org/spine/en/html/free_for_all.peter_..."No one else saw the 386 as interesting. Berkeley had a myopic attitude toward PCs. They were just toys. No one would support Intel." — Jordan Hubbard [1] --- Jolitz's project, of course, found many people on the Net who didn't think it was just a toy. Once he put the source code on the Net, a bloom of enthusiasm spread through the universities and waystations of the world. People wanted to experiment with a high-grade OS and most could only afford relatively cheap hardware like the 386. Sure, places like Berkeley could get the government grant money and the big corporate donations, but 2,000-plus other schools were stuck waiting. Jolitz's version of 386BSD struck a chord. While news traveled quickly to some corners, it didn't reach Finland. Network Release 2 came in June 1991, right around the same time that Linus Torvalds was poking around looking for a high-grade OS to use in experiments. Jolitz's 386BSD came out about six months later as Torvalds began to dig into creating the OS he would later call Linux. Soon afterward, Jolitz lost interest in the project and let it lie, but others came along. In fact, two groups called NetBSD and FreeBSD sprang up to carry the torch. --- [2][2] https://www.sisudoc.org/spine/en/html/free_for_all.peter_way...
- I never believe people when they say, we would have been famous if not for one piece of bad luck 35 years ago.
Yeah, i'm sure the lawsuit was crappy and set things back. But if you can't recover after 35 years, then its something deeper than what happened 35 years ago.
- It's hard to blame OpenBSD's management when there are three other BSDs. You didn't have to work with Theo de Raadt to work on BSD. But while the lawsuit may have been the catalyst, the game was really over when GNOME took off. BSD was sort of an equal target under KDE, but GNOME prioritized Linux pretty hard and had a lot of fans. At that point pretty much everyone making interesting desktop stuff went to Linux and never looked back. Which is not solely a license issue; you can definitely release GPL software for FreeBSD, but the "license war" culture (to the extent it really existed) may have been an issue.
And I guess I do think that FreeBSD had a saner organization pattern than the sort of haphazard ecosystem of projects that grew up around GNU and Linux. Maybe the chaos was necessary for growth, but it still seems to be a hurdle for new Linux users in the current day.
- i think what the chaos did was enable more individual contributors. you didn't have to join the BSD team to get a core OS tool accepted into the system. anyone could just mix and match the tools and apps they liked. it's not that BSD prevented that but that they just didn't invite it. you can create your own spin of a distribution and if it gets enough users and contributors it gets accepted as an official version. there is even a debian variant using a BSD kernel. try making a official BSD spin using GNU coreutils.
- > there is even a debian variant using a BSD kernel.
it's dead as of july 2023: https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/ :
> The development of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD has officially terminated as of July 2023 due to the lack of interest and volunteers. You may find the official announcement here[1]
here[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/07/msg00176.html
- GNOME prioritises Linux now but it shipped with Solaris from 2003 onwards and Sun contributed accessibility features around that time.
- > BSD was sort of an equal target under KDE, but GNOME prioritized Linux pretty hard and had a lot of fans.
oh boy its' much worse than that: KDE/GNOME were already largely precarious before that.
The whole Xorg thing was really dependant on gpu drivers and the story between linux gpu drivers and *bsd gpu drivers was so much different. Having the BSDs be fairly different didn't really help (eg: only FreeBSD had official nvidia drivers, albeit proprietary).
Gnome did take a lot of backlash and Gnome essentially became a meme at some point ("what's the use case for that?")
Gnome did take a strong dependency on systemd (both gnome and systemd are developed by Red Hat, btw).
And Gnome also did push a lot for wayland (that wasn't implemented on the various BSDs for a long time).
I haven't checked in a while, but I think Gnome is wayland-only nowadays ?
Ultimately, the real issue with KDE/GNOME and the BSDs is that the BSDs are largely irrelevant and essentially only relevant for some specific use-cases where desktop usage is not involved.
- I mean, Torvalds has called basically every person on earth an asshole at some point, hasn’t he? He’s the opposite of being sparing with critisicism, and frankly has historically often used his bully pulpit to do it.
- My read on Torvalds is that, coming from him, "asshole" is a much lesser criticism than "difficult".
- [flagged]
- There are many extremely competent engineers who can’t deal with the idea of exposing themselves to public humiliation. That’s especially true in today’s environment where these kind of bully rants have become a spectacle for outsiders. Just google the name of the person who was the subject to one of Linus’ rants about a year ago. Despite being a very accomplished figure in the RISC-V world, top results for his name are links to Linus calling him an idiot. That’s a mark he will have for life. I would die of embarrassment.
It’s perfectly possible to critique without being a bully.
What Theo and Linus are doing wrong is scaring away a large pool of potential contributors who don’t want to take that risk.
- > It’s perfectly possible to critique without being a bully.
Yep. And it's perfectly possible to accept being called stupid, if you truly did do something boneheaded. It's not a permanent scar that ruins the rest of your life, as you seem to believe.
> What Theo and Linus are doing wrong is scaring away a large pool of potential contributors who don’t want to take that risk.
Good riddance.
- [dead]
- Personally I believe being an asshole to people is doing something wrong.
- [flagged]
- > I don't classify thin skinned snowflakes who do stupid things that get them screamed at by Linus, and then are butthurt about it for years, as being "extremely competent."
There is no reason to believe that there is a causation between being a “thin skinned snowflake” and being incompetent. That said, it doesn’t surprise me at all that some kind of people would make that assumption.
- > A simple tool was presented, iofuzz, that exposes exploitable security flaws in most, if not all, virtual machines available today. To the knowledge of the author, no similar research has been conducted before. The results produced by crashme, a tool well known for over a decade, locating trivial flaws dem- onstrates this. No virtual machine tested was robust enough to withstand the testing procedure used, and multiple exploitable flaws were presented that could allow an attacker restricted to a vir- tualised environment to reliably escape onto the host system. The results obtained demonstrate the need for further research into virtualisation security and prove that virtualisa- tion is no security panacea.
https://taviso.decsystem.org/virtsec.pdf
He’s not wrong based on the research at the time. The mistake is presenting this as if it’s something that will be true for all time. Is virtualization a panacea? No. CPU manufacturers can’t even protect against side channel attacks. But it’s completely missing what this provides which is that the difficulty and cost of creating an exploit is higher today than 20 years ago. And it’s amusing to hear someone blasting away at the security of others when BSD has its own share of problems and architectural weaknesses are discovered through popularity of your system being an attack target, not because you’re smarter than everyone else and made better choices (sometimes it can be true in places, but harder to maintain for a big piece of software like an OS)
- I don't understand the constant (almost always unsubstantiated) criticism of the *BSDs from many Linux advocates.
Personally I evaluate each OS by it's merit, and I've concluded that OpenBSD, FreeBSD and some Linux distributions(I use arch btw) are solid operating systems.
On the server I prefer FreeBSD because of it's amazing flexibility, and stable yet evolutionary base system and in my opinion, superior init system. Simple RC scripts FTW.
I use Arch Linux for superior software and hardware support, related to client usage.
I use OpenBSD for various network appliances.
- I wished more people would take issue with developers' bad attitudes.
I know this is an extremely unpopular take, but I refuse to use software where the main dev(s) are openly abusive to others. Sadly this includes the majority of open source operating systems and many other very popular applications... but it's my decision and you're welcome to disagree with me. I am not trying to prevent others from using said software, and I don't look down on them for it.
I think if everyone was always forced to separate the art from the artist, then boycotting wouldn't even be a thing, so there should probably be some kind of middle ground.
- It appears this mail thread from 2007 was about Xen. NetBSD was an early adopter, not for security but for experimentation
Meanwhile Amazon was using Xen for AWS
Later a "security researcher" used Xen to create the "Qubes" OS
- If OpenBSD pretended Qubes OS was a feature prototype/reference OS build and made a fork of OpenBSD to feature-match Qubes OS (calling it QuBSD or something), that would be great!
- I would love to know how OP came across this email nearly 20 years after the fact
- It's one of Theo's more famous dismissals/takedowns.
- Some people keep classic flames alive to deploy in times of need. Theo's good, but he can't hold a candle to the late Marc Cripsin railing about emacs line-mode-visual. Grr.
https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1tf1iy/imap_inventor...
>From: Mark Crispin, To: comp.lang.emacs
>What mindless cretin thought that it should be a good idea to make line-move-visual be the default in emacs 23? I just found out about this charming "improvement" in the worst possible way. Investigation determined that a "routine" software update had just installed emacs 23 and gave me this "improvement".
>People wonder why everybody hasn't dumped proprietary desktop software. This is an example why. Emacs' line behavior has well over 30 years of history, and some bagbiter goes and changes it BY DEFAULT.
>Add all the cute new features you want. But leave the goddamn defaults alone.
>If you want to have your own playpen where you twiddle defaults to your hearts content, have at it. But don't pretend that you produce software for a production environment, and stop telling the Linux distributions that they should "upgrade" to your "improved" versions. People doing real work depend upon those distributions.
>It does no good to say "read the release notes" when the affected users don't get the release notes and don't even know that a new release happened. It is also unreasonable to expect users to subscribe to every obscure newsgroup, forum, and wiki to hear about changes that will turn their expectations upside down.
>Yes, I fixed my .emacs file. And I'm putting in the same change to all the .emacs files on all the dozens of other machines I use, even though they still have emacs 22, because otherwise this unpleasant surprise will repeat itself over and over again.
>Grr.
>From: Mark Crispin, To: comp.lang.emacs
>They made the wrong decision. Changes to default behavior are a bad idea. Changes to default behavior of the most basic functionality are an extremely bad idea.
>I don't care if M-X fart-noisily-with-spray changes its default scent from skunk to lemon. But I damn well do care about the most basic operations: all CTRL single letter and ESC single letter. After 33+ years of using emacs, I expect these to be reliable and not suddenly change.
>I wasted hours trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with my file, or my terminal emulator window, or my system. The fact that the problem went away on a different system added further confusion. It was only when I did ESC <n> CTRL/N and saw that it moved me the wrong number of lines, but only on one system, that I realized that emacs changed. And that's when I did ESC X describe-key CTRL/N and read about line-mode-visual, although it did not mention that this was now the default.
>Surprise. Grr.
- Another classic. About the X11 selection mechanism
- i don't know that crispin rant sounds pretty reasonable to me. it's not insulting and the argument is coherent. he has a point.
- Theo's rant about what an hypocritical idiot ESR is also sounds pretty reasonable to me: he has a point.
ESR's free to make ridiculous laws that aren't true, but blaming it on Linus was a dick mode.
porridgeraisin: Speaking of ICCCM (aka I39L) and X11 selections, have you seen David Rosenthal's glorious rant about the Sun Desktop that somebody leaked to the unix-haters mailing list (who, moi?), which comes straight from the author of the ICCCM and co-developer of X10, X11, and NeWS. The Roy Lichtenstein line is classic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44045304
Check out his blog, recently he's been writing about his introduction to computer graphics, hacking late at night on the PDP-7 connected to the Titan at Cambridge University, and how Coprophagia Is Bad For You! He was employee #4 at NVIDIA.PS - I notice that someone filed a bug today pointing out that even your example of dropping a mail message on CM doesn't work if CM is closed. That's a symptom of the kind of arrogance that all the deskset tools seem to show - they're so whizzy and important that they deserve acres of screen real estate. Why can't they just shut up and do their job efficiently and inconspicuously? Why do they have to shove their bells and whistles in my face all the time? They're like 50's American cars - huge and covered with fins. What I want is more like a BMW, small, efficient, elegant and understated. Your focus on the whizzy demos may look great at trade shows, but who wants to have their tools screaming at them for attention all the time? It's like having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall.
- My favorite Theologism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law"My favorite part of the "many eyes" argument is how few bugs were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and never actually audit code." -Theo de Raadt - I think de Raadt and OpenBSD are hugely overrated and some takes are as dumb as the one in the post.
OpenBSD is only secure because because it does pretty much nothing and does it very slowly (its firewall just recently broke the 4gbps firewalling capabilty, for example) but somehow a cult has formed around it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Counter-take:
Linux is only secure because of OpenSSH.
In all seriousness, the OpenBSD guys are very conservative with technology. The OpenBSD pf stack (as well as much of the kernel) isn't heavily threaded due to the risk of race conditions. They also (correctly) predicted a lot of the speculative CPU attacks by not supporting it by default.
They've done a lot of security research and pioneered a lot of open source work around OS-level stack smashing technologies, like memory executable-space protection (W^X), early process privilege separation, memory space randomization, etc. Some of these features are not great for performance, but do help and have been adopted by other systems.
You're basically arguing that an armoured car sucks because a Ferrari can smoke it on a race track. There are times you want a Ferrari and there are times you want a Brinks truck.
- In fairness, minimizing surface area (doing nothing unless you need to) is security 101, so i hardly think that is a criticism.
- god bless usenet. The good ol' flame wars aren't what they are used to anymore with all this moderation and trolling feeding each other around here.
- This is not usenet, it's the openbsd misc@ mailing list.
- Even very smart, very accomplished people can be very wrong. Xen is seeing a resurgence from Xen Orchestra and I've used it in my homelab. It's quite pleasant. I also, of course, use de Raadt's software as well.
- I think that everyone has the power to be wrong, but to be very wrong with convincing arguments, you must be smart.
A smart person can come up with post-hoc rationalizations that hold up under some scrutiny, to the point it is very hard to convince them otherwise. Add to that people who became famous or successful on the back of "being right" on some subject matter, getting used to "being right even in the face of overwhelming push back", and you have a recipe for very smart people being very wrong in very visible/loud ways.
64 points by turrini 4 hours ago | 56 comments