How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst' chip flaw

Re:How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst... by anonacct37 on Thursday January 04, 2018 @03:54PM (#16073985)

This is true, but like other extinction level events it might actually open up the space for some new ideas.

Someone on my twitter put it this way: microkernels could see a resurgence if the cost of a context switch into kernel is just as high as the cost of context switching between 2 processes.

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Re:How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst... by nly on Thursday January 04, 2018 @04:02PM (#16074039)

Microkernels you say? Yay, more complexity!

In all seriousness, the Nintendo Switch users a microkernel and just got completely p3wned. It's extremely fanciful that we know how to build robust modular microkernels when we can't even get the simple stuff right.

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Re:How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst... by willtim on Thursday January 04, 2018 @04:08PM (#16074102)

I think you have it backwards. Monolithic kernels are by their very nature more complex to reason about due to all the communication backchannels made possible when everything sits in one process.

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Re:How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst... by SOLAR_FIELDS on Thursday January 04, 2018 @05:47PM (#16074840)

This discussion seems vaguely familiar for some reason...[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...

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Re:How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst... by anonacct37 on Thursday January 04, 2018 @04:35PM (#16074292)

It's definitely a tradeoff. Distributed systems are hard. Isolation is good. One of the best tools we have for isolation is processes and MMUs.

I'm not saying we should all switch, it's just that it's possible, given my understanding of how we're dealing with the intel bug, that one of the arguments against microkernels just went way. So they might make sense in places they previously didn't.

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Re:How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst... by marcosdumay on Thursday January 04, 2018 @04:14PM (#16074152)

Microkernels mean more insulation and standardization.

Yes, it's a form of complexity; just not what tend to relate to problems.

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Re:How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst... by derekp7 on Thursday January 04, 2018 @05:41PM (#16074788)

The complexity comes from when those standards don't let you do something, and you have to do weird things to break through them. Such as leaky abstractions.

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Re:How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst... by marcosdumay on Thursday January 04, 2018 @06:16PM (#16075016)

Microkernels IPC ought to be enough for anybody.

Seriously, completely generic IPC is not something impossible. You may have some to create some large drivers, but the insulation is still there, even for those.

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Re:How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst... by lloeki on Thursday January 04, 2018 @04:22PM (#16074207)

LISP machines!

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