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EROS 1.1 relased under GPL

Posted by Roblimo on from the yet-another-operating-system dept.

ROSE writes "EROS: The Extremely Reliable Operating System, is now released under GPL. See EROS web site for details. For those who don't know what is EROS, read FAQ for details." Cute lil' Cupid mascot, too. This might make a nice project for people who feel Linux is too "mass market" for them these days.

1 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Re: I'm Uncomfortable With This... by Pseudonym · · Score: 5
    The EROS FAQ mentions that there is no such thing as 'root'; there is no user who has total authority. This is a double-edged sword. While the absence of root makes compromising a system difficult (since there's no Obvious Target to gain access to), it also prevents a legitimate user from manipulating or killing processes that simply refuse to grant the capability.

    EROS has no concept of root because the kernel has no concept of a user at all. In a capability-based OS with POSIX, users are part of the executive (or the Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons). There's no reason why the executive can't implement a root user, i.e. one with the capability to do anything.

    One benefit of using capabilities rather than users and groups is that it's possible to restrict your own access. Suppose I want to run a program which I don't necessarily trust. I can drop myself into a "sub-user" with all my previous permissions, except that I have no rights to write to the file system, and run it safe in the knowledge that nothing is going to be trashed. Just like chroot() only much more flexible.

    --
    sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});