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ACM Queue Interviews Robert Watson On Open Source Hardware and Research
An anonymous reader writes "ACM Queue interviews Cambridge researcher (and FreeBSD developer) Robert Watson on why processor designs need to change in order to better support security features like Capsicum — and how they change all the time (RISC, GPUs, etc). He also talks about the challenge of building a research team at Cambridge that could actually work with all levels of the stack: CPU design, operating systems, compilers, applications, and formal methods. The DARPA-sponsored SRI and Cambridge CTSRD project is building a new open source processor that can support orders of magnitude greater sandboxing than current designs."
There is an OxBridge processor. (Or is it DarBridge?)
It wasn't clear whether Watson was talking about the need to support faster context switching and greater numbers of processes (perhaps related to the memory consumed by each thread) or something more directly related to security, such as cryptographic support.
But I only watched a few minutes before Flash crashed on me. Maybe if my desktop had one of those Cambridge research CPUs...
This story has been up for about an hour now. It's about several topics that anyone wit a passion for computer science, software development, hardware development or computing in general should find very interested. It even involves one of the most important open source contributors ever, Robert Watson.
Yet aside from this comment, there are only three others! One of the comments is complete gibberish. One of the remaining two, the one by Sulpher, is absolutely useless because it adds nothing to the discussion. The third comment actually has much value, but it's not easily visible because it was posted anonymously.
What is happening here at Slashdot? In the past, a story like this would have at least several hundred comments after an hour. There'd be a lot of great discussion. But today, we see basically nothing.
Has everyone fled to Reddit or Hacker News? Is that why there is so little discussion here at Slashdot these days? Is there merely nobody of value left here?
~ ... Irving Berlin, Joe DiMaggio ... /#
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
> "CPU design, operating systems, compilers, applications, and formal methods."
Compiler comes before OS in that hierarchy.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
All the people of value were at the party last night, you didn't get the invite?
Integer overflow is the new buffer overflow. See http://blog.regehr.org for many examples. We need CPU's that can trap when it happens. Yes, we can have the compiler generate checks instead, but nobody does it because of the code bloat and slowdown involved, unless they EXPECT overflow and use a bignum library. But it's the unexpected overflow that kills you, so zero-overhead checking should be provided by the hardware and enabled all the time. In cases where you actually want wraparound arithmetic, use special datatypes for the purpose.
It's a shame AMD cut address base & length from data descriptor functionality when they released their x64 architecture. It seemed well-fit for allowing fast context-switching of sandboxed components without having to deal with slow TLB invalidation. It also would have been easier to take advantage of in a 64-bit address space, as it required chopping up the linear address space into fixed segments, and 4GB was a little tight. Hopefully we'll see more useful mainstream CPU primitives to achieve high-performance, high-scale sandboxing. I am interested to see how these instructions would be implemented at the user-level.
Cartoons and masturbating in your parent's basement are more interesting than this.
You made try to reread the OP in a way that makes it fit the song. I failed. :-)
I hope the first statement from the interviewer was either
"Mr. Watson, come here - I want to see you"
or
"Come, Watson, the game is afoot!"
#DeleteChrome
While have more hardware support for isolation is always nice, there is a lot of sandboxing that could be done in software, which we currently don't. Techniques such as SFI/CFI/XFI are only now starting to get understood outside of a narrow circle of researchers (Google Native Client is an SFI system for instance, I don't understand why that does not get mentioned in the video when there is so much talk about Chrome), and if we can solve this in software we don't have to replace all our existing hardware. This old and short paper : https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~savage/papers/HotOS95.pdf argues well that "protection is a software issue" and is still worth a read.
I misread the story headline as an interview with *IBM*s Watson.
That's because the OP is a screwball. He started his post with "God's". That's the only clue you need.
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Why couldn't they get the winner to provide a text, or LaTeX, or PDF, or even HTML version of their talk/speech, and make it easier to visually scan and re-read, rather than worry about lame encoder/video/flash/html5 issues and plug-ins?
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You'd think a society like the ACM could know and use computing machinery, wouldn't you, or is that expecting too much in this world? And you'd think that people on /. would be all over this topic, whereas there are NO comments rated over (or even AT) 2 points currently (9:40 PM PDT, 2012-10-20 Saturday in California).
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At least the SSL article has over 100 posts on it, but the 21st IOCCC Source Code Released article also only has 22 posts on it. Either this means coders are actually out on Friday and Saturday nights (not zehr likely ;>) ) or the population at this watering hole is not what it purports to be...