"Midori" Concepts Materialize In .NET

dp619 writes "Concepts outlined in Microsoft's internal 'Midori' OS documents are materializing in .NET, according to an SD Times report. Midori is a new operating system project that is designed for distributed concurrency. Microsoft has assigned some of its all-star programmers to the project, while recruiting others. It is also working on other projects to replace Windows that make the OS act more like a hypervisor."

Comments

Re:Hypervisor

[Jahava]

What are you smoking? Windows kernel itself hasn't really been vulnerable to anything, it's the third party software like Flash, Adobe PDF Reader, internet browsers, and previously some services.

So here's what Google has to say on the subject:

• Vulnerabilities in Windows Kernel
• Vulnerabilities in Windows Kernel Could Allow Elevation of Privilege (977165)
• Vulnerability in Windows Kernel Privilege Escalation
• GDT and LDT in Windows kernel vulnerability exploitation
• Vulnerability in Windows Kernel Could Allow Elevation of Privilege
• And many more...

For the lazy reader, almost every article here has the phrase "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run arbitrary code in kernel mode." For the even lazier, allow me to summarize: "That's a Bad Thing"

Indeed, like any long-lasting public multi-version kernel, the Windows kernel has had a hefty share of vulnerabilities. What you said is just plain false. However, to the OP:

So this means your hypervisor can get infected? Is it really such a great idea to use the largest individual security risk in computers as a hypervisor?

You may want to think a little harder about what you mean by kernel. Every hypervisor is a type of kernel. Some things that perform hypervisor-like roles are full-fledged kernels. However, if you actually click the link in the article that you're quoting, you'd see that they're not talking even remotely about what you think they are. The article details how Microsoft is investigating changing some fundamental (read: legacy, UNIXy, etc.) kernel models and roles to take a shot at getting more successful multicore performance and a better user experience. It's less about "zomg Windows is a hypervisor" and more about "what traditional Kernel roles can we modify?"

If you understood even fundamental systems architecture concepts, you'd realize that Windows as a hypervisor is a lot less scary than Windows as a standalone OS, as the latter is not only handed full system control, but is also responsible for arbitrating userspace execution.

Corrections regarding F#

[shutdown -p now]

There are a few things in SDTimes article, in the bit where they talk about F#, which are incorrect:

For instance, F# is highly immutable—meaning that object states cannot be modified once created

This isn't really true. F# defaults to immutable locals and record/object fields, but you can always declare them as mutable explicitly if you want. In that, it's quite similar to OCaml, and quite different from Haskell. Example:

type Foo =
  let x = 0 // immutable field
  member this.Bar() =
    let y = x // immutable local
    y <- y + 1 // error
    x <- y // error
 
// Mutable class
type Foo =
  let mutable x = 0 // mutable field
  member this.Bar() =
    let mutable y = x // mutable local
    y <- y + 1 // okay
    x <- y // okay

And then also:

... and has an implicit type system

There's nothing "implicit" about F#'s type system - it's quite in-your-face, in fact even more so than in a typical OO language such as C# or Java. For example, it won't do automatic upcasts.

I guess what they meant there is that F# has Hindley-Milner type inference.