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.
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.
> 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.
Ha! That’s some rose colored glasses viewing 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 was until Linux came along and started eating up all of BSDs user base that they freaked out and decided x86 support might be a good idea. But by then it was too late.
GhostBSD DragonflyBSD pf/opn sense even funky hybrid stuff like Chimera Linux, out of curiosity I had a quick search and the list goes on https://github.com/DiscoverBSD/awesome-bsd
Linux has a lot of corporate sponsorship and its own legal hurdles of the past (SCO le sigh.)
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:
"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]
I heard about 386BSD long before I heard about Linux but I didn't have a 386, or for that matter an easy way to get it.
I did have a 286, but I also didn't have a way to get Minix.
And then round about the time that I got a 386SX-25 with a whopping 4MB of RAM, Linux 0.9 came around on a couple of floppies, and that was kind of that.
I don't know if I still even have that 386, a little small form factor Compaq Deskpro. I know I needed to add a bodge wire to repair a blown comm port at one point. I hope I still do have it, it's probably got some of my terrible early Unix programming on it!
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).
Was that ever verified? I know that detractors said that, but MS claimed that the copyright notice was only there to cover the utilities like ping.exe and finger.exe (which really were based on BSD).
I think the older NT source code is now available to read, isn't it? Going back and sorting out the truth of some of the claims from the 90s OS wars might actually be quite a fun research project...
I'm not sure if the NT IP stack was ever BSD, but many of the windows 3.11 and early 95 (before Microsoft natively added support) were from the BSD stack, or at the very least re-implemented the BSD socket API (Most famously Trumpet Winsock). This probably fed the rumours. IIRC winsock was also bundled as an "extras" in some pre-native IP supported versions of NT.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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..)
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.
Virtualization is responsible for effectively none of those security benefits.
It is the reduction to a smaller “kernel” that is responsible. If you applied the same design and operational model to running regular old processes instead of virtual machines you would also get a system with less security holes than the grossly insecure rat’s nest that is Linux, Windows, or whatever other commercial IT OS you have in mind.
Virtualization is almost entirely orthogonal, if not harmful, to security of the platform and operations. It is not magic pixie dust that makes your operational model more robust. You need a robust operational model, then you can have a robust operational model with virtual machines.
There is a reason why the most secure systems in the world are separation kernel architectures instead of hypervisors even though most of those systems do support virtualization as a feature, just not as the basis of their security propertys.
Great, then falsify it. Point at a system with the same operational model as KVM-based multi-tenant systems with large numbers of platform vulnerabilitys.
Let us review a standard operational model:
Virtual machines are usually pre-allocated their total RAM. Virtual machines are usually pre-allocated a number of cores and pinned to them. Virtual machines are usually only allocated a small number of devices such as a virtual block storage device and virtual network device upon which they implement a in-VM filesystem and network stack. Virtual machines usually have no access to shared services provided by the hypervisor.
So we have a operational model where you have to pre-allocate RAM to a process. You have to pre-allocate a whole core and pin the process to it. The process has no access to a global filesystem, network stack, or devices. The process has access to exactly one file, which is logically similar to a virtual block storage device, and a single raw network socket, which is logically similar to a virtual network device. The process has no ability to form a socket to another process, form a new file, or even have any way of interacting with other processes at all. The process has no access to shared services of any kind.
The chasm between that operational model and any commercial IT operating system is immense, being basically the polar opposite in every dimension in the direction of security. Default-deny instead of default-allow. Shared-nothing instead of shared-everything. What you have there is a system even more static and simple than what runs on most microkernels. That is the comparable class of platforms with a similar operational model.
To demonstrate that virtualization is the key factor, you need to demonstrate that actually comparable systems with similar operational models like microkernels have more platform vulnerabilitys than comparable KVM-based, or even just hypervisor-based, systems. Which, again, flies against the face of evidence as the systems that are actually used in high security applications designed to protect against state actors are separation kernels instead of hypervisors.
While this is true, the unspoken factor here is compatibility. Fixing the design and operational model of Linux (or any Unix derivative) to a sensible default-nothing architecture requires completely changing the semantics of the OS, which would break so much existing software to the point that one might as well write a new kernel+userspace from scratch. It's a lot easier for a sysadmin to just plop their existing rat's nest in a hardware-accelerated parallel universe and say "job done".
Sure, this is why virtualization is a valuable feature, it is just not the basis of security/isolation.
One of the points I am making is that when deploying on a modern multi-tenant VM-based platform, VM orchestration is analogous to process orchestration. However, you orchestrate the units, VMs, in a very different way to how you would orchestrate processes on say Linux. If your platform orchestrates, configures, and operates processes the same way a VM-based platform orchestrates, configures, and operates VMs and your implementation is solid then you would see similar security benefits. Virtualization is not the key. It just kind of looks that way because virtualization is usually paired with a fundamental re-architecture.
In greenfield application development or cases where you would do single-application VMs, you would target processes/platform directly. Only in situations where you are literally lifting code from a different OS environment that you can not or will not port to the native model would you need to go through a VM. If you orchestrate them the same way and your operational models for them are similar, then you will usually see similar outcomes. This is how it works in high security microkernels/separation kernels which simultaneously allow native processes alongside VMs. Virtualization is a feature to allow non-porting, it is not security/isolation; that is already provided underneath.
> 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.
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)
"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)_/¯
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.
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!
Maybe they mixed up usenet by doing what I used to do back then - use gmane so I could follow various mailing lists via NNTP for better thread tracking and not filling up my inbox.
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.
If you like Arch and init systems with simple RC scripts, check out Artix Linux (https://artixlinux.org/), which is an Arch-based Linux distribution that supports multiple options for init systems.
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.
There was no abuse and bad attitude. He was telling the truth about Linux hypervisors. And it got worse since then. Then they talked Xen, which at least has a security boundary. Now everybody switched to kvm with none. Only speed matters, security not at all.
Disagree, but regardless, both Theo and Linus have long, storied histories of prolonged habitual abuse without much remorse. Even after Linus "stepped back", it never really stopped after he came back.
We'll probably also disagree on what is abuse or not, but that's ok.
Don't take this personally, but I am sorry to have to inform you that it was, in fact, almost 20 years ago. Just months after Rihanna released Umbrella, and a year after Mika released
Relax.
I don't know who this guy is but this is just a shitty way to interact with people. Presumably he's successful or we wouldn't be talking about him without any introduction, but I wouldn't hire this person to sweep the floors at my office.
63 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 52.3 ms ] threadhttps://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
"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.
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.
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.
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 was until Linux came along and started eating up all of BSDs user base that they freaked out and decided x86 support might be a good idea. But by then it was too late.
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.
Linux has a lot of corporate sponsorship and its own legal hurdles of the past (SCO le sigh.)
When was that? Presumably wwaaaaaaaay before 386BSD was a thing right?
Quotes below:
[1] https://www.doc-reform.org/spine/en/html/free_for_all.peter_...[2] https://www.sisudoc.org/spine/en/html/free_for_all.peter_way...
I did have a 286, but I also didn't have a way to get Minix.
And then round about the time that I got a 386SX-25 with a whopping 4MB of RAM, Linux 0.9 came around on a couple of floppies, and that was kind of that.
I don't know if I still even have that 386, a little small form factor Compaq Deskpro. I know I needed to add a bodge wire to repair a blown comm port at one point. I hope I still do have it, it's probably got some of my terrible early Unix programming on it!
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 think the older NT source code is now available to read, isn't it? Going back and sorting out the truth of some of the claims from the 90s OS wars might actually be quite a fun research project...
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.
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.
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...
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..)
I'm not sure what the purpose of revisiting this is beyond provoking a flamewar on a slow Sunday.
Regardless i do agree with you though, not sure what the point of digging up ancient skeletons is.
"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...
It is the reduction to a smaller “kernel” that is responsible. If you applied the same design and operational model to running regular old processes instead of virtual machines you would also get a system with less security holes than the grossly insecure rat’s nest that is Linux, Windows, or whatever other commercial IT OS you have in mind.
Virtualization is almost entirely orthogonal, if not harmful, to security of the platform and operations. It is not magic pixie dust that makes your operational model more robust. You need a robust operational model, then you can have a robust operational model with virtual machines.
There is a reason why the most secure systems in the world are separation kernel architectures instead of hypervisors even though most of those systems do support virtualization as a feature, just not as the basis of their security propertys.
Let us review a standard operational model:
Virtual machines are usually pre-allocated their total RAM. Virtual machines are usually pre-allocated a number of cores and pinned to them. Virtual machines are usually only allocated a small number of devices such as a virtual block storage device and virtual network device upon which they implement a in-VM filesystem and network stack. Virtual machines usually have no access to shared services provided by the hypervisor.
So we have a operational model where you have to pre-allocate RAM to a process. You have to pre-allocate a whole core and pin the process to it. The process has no access to a global filesystem, network stack, or devices. The process has access to exactly one file, which is logically similar to a virtual block storage device, and a single raw network socket, which is logically similar to a virtual network device. The process has no ability to form a socket to another process, form a new file, or even have any way of interacting with other processes at all. The process has no access to shared services of any kind.
The chasm between that operational model and any commercial IT operating system is immense, being basically the polar opposite in every dimension in the direction of security. Default-deny instead of default-allow. Shared-nothing instead of shared-everything. What you have there is a system even more static and simple than what runs on most microkernels. That is the comparable class of platforms with a similar operational model.
To demonstrate that virtualization is the key factor, you need to demonstrate that actually comparable systems with similar operational models like microkernels have more platform vulnerabilitys than comparable KVM-based, or even just hypervisor-based, systems. Which, again, flies against the face of evidence as the systems that are actually used in high security applications designed to protect against state actors are separation kernels instead of hypervisors.
One of the points I am making is that when deploying on a modern multi-tenant VM-based platform, VM orchestration is analogous to process orchestration. However, you orchestrate the units, VMs, in a very different way to how you would orchestrate processes on say Linux. If your platform orchestrates, configures, and operates processes the same way a VM-based platform orchestrates, configures, and operates VMs and your implementation is solid then you would see similar security benefits. Virtualization is not the key. It just kind of looks that way because virtualization is usually paired with a fundamental re-architecture.
In greenfield application development or cases where you would do single-application VMs, you would target processes/platform directly. Only in situations where you are literally lifting code from a different OS environment that you can not or will not port to the native model would you need to go through a VM. If you orchestrate them the same way and your operational models for them are similar, then you will usually see similar outcomes. This is how it works in high security microkernels/separation kernels which simultaneously allow native processes alongside VMs. Virtualization is a feature to allow non-porting, it is not security/isolation; that is already provided underneath.
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)
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)_/¯
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.
Meanwhile Amazon was using Xen for AWS
Later a "security researcher" used Xen to create the "Qubes" OS
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 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.
.. is abusive.
We'll probably also disagree on what is abuse or not, but that's ok.
But ten years ago. What is the point now?