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Europe Funds Secure Operating System Research
narramissic writes "A Dutch university has received a $3.3 million grant from the European Research Council to fund 5 more years of work on a Unix-type operating system, called Minix, that aims to be more reliable and secure than either Linux or Windows. The latest grant will enable the three researchers and two programmers on the project to further their research into a making Minix capable of fixing itself when a bug is detected, said Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a computer science professor at Vrije Universiteit. 'It irritates me to no end when software doesn't work,' Tanenbaum said. 'Having to reboot your computer is just a pain. The question is, can you make a system that actually works very well?'"
I thought Windows was secure. Why not use that? *cough* *cough*
.. they want their funding back.
Seriously , I thought minix had been put out to pasture years ago.
Also what are 5 people going to manage that entire corporations and thousands of OSS developers failed to do in the last few decades? Ok , one of them might be the next Alan Turing and surprise us all but I won't hold my breath.
said Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a computer science professor at Vrije Universiteit
It sounds intentionally misleading to present them as "a computer science professor" when he's the one MINIX guy.
You just got troll'd!
Now that Minix 3 is here, Linus can take his monolithic kernel and stuff it! Microkernels are the wave of the future, man!
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Software, heal thyself? There's a reason self-modifying code is frowned upon. Besides, is kernel reliability really an issue these days? Even the Windows kernel only really crashes when you feed it bad memory.
They are actually talking about things like driver isolation with monitoring and restarts. The answer to whether kernels are stable enough depends on your requirements. I find that I am much less forgiving when my DVD player crashes and doesn't record the film I have set than when my computer crashes, though both are now very rare events. Monitoring, isolation and restarting is used in things like engine management systems, where failures are even less welcome and a full OS with this level of reliability is bound to have applications in medicine, industry, "defence", etc.
Yes, imagine that: A professor trying to teach students how to implement something new and potentially useful rather than clicking ok in the 'solve my problem' wizard.
How many times is this old chestnut going to be tossed around?
MS tried a microkernel with NT and its HAL. It didn't really work very well. Most Unix varients don't even bother to try.
I think you are right at the moment. I am not sure that you will still be right when processors are 256-core or greater. I think that at some point the overhead of microkernals will be made up for by utilisation of greater parallelisation.
Actually he said: "Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-)" the :-) is important.
2009 will finally be the Year of the Minix Desktop!
That depends on how you've designed things, I guess. "Today's PC hardware" (& yesterdays for that matter) has always provided 4 protection ring levels, but very few OSes have ever made use of more than 2 (1 for the kernel, one for userspace). You could certainly put drivers in a higher ring than the kernel and allow them to only have limited access to memory, just as you do with a user-space application.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
I remember submitting some patches to them many years ago when I got Minix working in less that one megabyte of RAM (at the time Minix worked at 1Mb and up) and thinking that it would be nice if it were GPL and if I had the time...
As I recall some guy in Finland did have the time
Has anyone noticed how more and more stuff gets moved from the Linux kernel into user space these days; FUSE is a good example. History may record that, broadly speaking, Tanenbaum was corrent and Torvalds was not. Anyway, I assume you are saying that since Linux has been so much more successful than Minix, we must listen to Torvalds and ignore Tanenbaum? On that basis, we should listen to Gates and ignore Torvalds!
...is to call this news. The grant was received in November 2008! (see http://www.minix3.org/news/)
I though Minix was dead for some 15 years....
Did netcraft confirm it?
No, but dividing things into smaller pieces makes it easier to fix those pieces in isolation. It's easier for a microkernel system to be self-healing because of that isolation.
This is not an amazing revelation. We've known about the idea of isolating changes since the invention of the sub-routine. The reason microkernels have always been relegated to second-best is that they require more context switching than a regular monolithic kernel. The tradeoff between "fast enough" and "reliable enough" has for some time now favoured "fast enough".
But that's changing -- people's computers are getting plenty fast. The 10-15% slowdown Tanenbaum claims for Minix3 is less of a drag than, say, an anti-virus program and could serve to more effectively prevent viruses into the bargain.
People who say microkernels are passe forget our industry is not set in stone. Priorities change and technologies change with them. In the last 10 years performance has become progressively less important than reducing bugs or speed of development. Microkernels have lots to offer in such a world.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
Back when Linus started to write his kernel the debate between monolithic and micro kernels still made some sense. But now more features and drivers are being written for linux and it is getting bigger and more bloated. Functions are being put into modules but that only solves half of your problem because a module can still bring down the kernel.
I think AST was right. Linux can't continue to use a monolithic architecture.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It's also a research OS - the aim isn't to make minix the next best thing, the aim is to research self-healing OS software by using minix as a test platform.
Most good production software takes a good look at similar software to imitate the best features of each - this isn't a competition between minix and linux, it's testing a feature is a simpler (and thus cheaper) fashion.
The aim is not to produce a better operating system, the aim is to secure funding. This is what academics actually do; good research is (at best) a byproduct. This is business as usual for a research group.
Not really. The purpose is doing the research you are interested in doing (even if it's just for your career ambitions). For that you need funding. So of course you have to do some marketing to sell the research you want to do to the people deciding whom to fund. You think this guy has been doing MINIX for 20 years just to get funding? It's the other way around, you get funding, to be independent and have people work for you so you can get some interesting stuff done. Or, if you are more cynical, he's working on MINIX because it generated enough interest that he could get a ton of publications out of it.
The real research will be a low priority, because the group will need to satisfy the EU bureaucracy that they are doing something worthwhile. Consequently, most of their time will be spent writing reports.
From my experience this is a bit of an exaggeration. It's true that EU-funded projects have more strings attached than those from many other funding sources, but running the burocracy/reports/financials for an EU project that is funding 3 full time people at our university still only takes a rather small percentage of my time.
And that's a lot more freedom to do real research than in any company environment i've seen or heard of so far. Big companies (even the good ones) have IMHO more bureaucracy, not less, and short-term horizon (want returns in 3, 5 years at the most), which means very little of what is called "research and development" has anything to do with research.
The real reason there is no security and that we have the monolithic vs micro kernel is that CPUs provide process isolation and not component isolation. Within a process, CPUs do not provide any sort of component isolation. If they did, then we would not have this discussion.
I once asked Tanenbaum (via email, he was kind enough to reply) why CPUs do not have in-process module isolation. He replied:
From: Andy Tanenbaum [ast@cs.vu.nl]
Sent: Ðáñáóêåõ, 1 Öåâñïõáñßïõ 2008 4:00 ìì
To:
Subject: Re: The debate monolithic vs micro kernels would not exist if CPUs
supported in-process modules.
I think redesigning CPUs is going to be a pretty tough sell.
Andy Tanenbaum
But why? I disagree with that for two reasons:
1) the flat address space need not be sacrificed. All that is required is a paging system extension that defines the component a page belongs to. The CPU can check inter-component access in the background. No change in the current software will be required. The only extra step would be to isolate components within a process, by setting the appropriate paging system extensions.
2) The extension will require minimal CPU space and CPU designers already have great experience in such designs (TLBs, etc). Money has been invested for less important problems (hardware sound, for example), so why not for in-process components? it will be very cheap, actually.
Of course, security is not only due to the lack of in-process component isolation, but it's a big step in the right direction...
That's a rather ignorant viewpoint.
Tanenbaum argued for greater modularity and really that's no bad thing, his arguments were pretty solid theoretically. But as we all know, just as the most beautiful, maintainable, stable software designs are sacrificed in business for something that works now even if it has it's flaws, Linux was available, easy to use and just worked the way people wanted, that didn't mean it was inherently better in theory or that Tanenbaum is wrong anymore than it means Windows is a vastly superior OS to Linux and MacOS X simply because it has such a massively larger user base.
Basing your view on Tanenbaum's one comment towards Torvalds is also rather ignorant, throughout the discussion you're referring to, Tanenbaum was well composed and formed coherent arguments, whilst Torvalds at times acted like your average troll.
You see, the very fact Windows is far and away the most popular OS followed by MacOS X followed by Linux is evidence enough that popularity means nothing in terms of the actual quality of an OS, it merely shows which played the business game better.
Tanenbaum is worth listening to, his ideas and justifications included in that 17 year old discussion you mention aren't wrong even if his predictions on the future of computing were. This is a man who understands the theory of how to make a better OS more so than most people do, and yes possibly even more so than Torvalds. The problem is that he's a theoretical guy, so whilst his proposals may be better, they may not be practical at the time they're announced or he simply may not have the time to dedicate to proving their practicality. If they're not practical at the time he proposes them though that doesn't mean they'll never be practical as changes in computing architecture or even raw computing power may make them practical.
Hopefully he'll put this funding to good use and it'll help provide him the time and resources he needs to take his ideas beyond mere theory and he'll be able to backup his theories with actual working demonstrations rather than just arguments now. You can be a Torvalds fanboy all you want but Tanenbaum and Torvalds are two different people - Tanenbaum is someone who comes up with theoretical new concepts, Torvalds is someone who takes existing concepts and implements them well. Both have their strengths, but writing one or the other off is foolish when both have a lot to offer.
I asked Tanenbaum this question at a lecture he gave on Minix 3 earlier this year. He responded that he changed his mind somewhat about the education-only issue because he felt that, to prove a point about the superiority of the microkernel design, you need to get it out of the lab and into the real world. He also felt that he could do this without hurting the simplicity of the system as a teaching tool. Incidentally, his intention is not to compete with Linux or Windows on the desktop, but rather to make a robust OS for embedded applications.
[citation needed]
All these years after the Tenenbaum-Torvalds debate Linus admitted his prof was right? You'd think that would have been in the news somewhere.