fleet

This architecture sounds like one I would want to use for all of my personal computing devices. I believe this because I did a bunch of experimental hacking three years ago with the objective of designing an operating system with usability and security characteristics that would suit me better than Linux or Android currently do. I didn't make a huge amount of progress toward a working system (you can see what I did here: https://github.com/marssaxman/fleet), but I spent a lot of time reading and thinking as I tinkered. The people working on Fuchsia have clearly thought deeply in similar directions, gone a lot further in the work, and resolved a lot of the uncertainties I encountered. I won't let Google manage my data for me, but if they can keep their fingers out of the pie I would gladly use a Fuchsia-based system as described here for m

Yes! This is an argument I've been making for several years now: the user-centric security model is obsolete and unhelpful, because most computers have either one or zero users in the traditional sense. The whole unix-style reduced-privileges-plus-sudo approach that Windows and MacOS have copied is a nuisance which doesn't really solve the problem; the permissions systems in Android and iOS are a little closer to the mark. Qubes is a good step forward. The real problem is exactly what you said: we can't fully trust software, even software which is not explicitly malicious, because software can be exploited, and because software authors sometimes want to be "helpful" in ways we'd really rather they weren't. Every piece of software should run within a sandbox, and the human user should have complete control over which resources are or are n

There's a lot of activity going on in this space right now, which is great. I was working on my own project very similar to this one, which I called 'fleet': http://www.github.com/marssaxman/fleet/ I've recently decided to stop working on this and to start contributing to IncludeOS instead, since they have a lot of energy and good ideas, and they're getting farther than I was on my own: http://www.github.com/hioa-cs/IncludeOS/ One great thing about unikernels is that fragmentation is not really a problem: it's a good thing to have a healthy, diverse ecosystem of unikernel libraries adapted for different purposes.

It's the basis for another project of his called 'fleet': https://github.com/marssaxman/fleet The idea for fleet (and thus for startc) is to work inside a hypervisor (kvm) instead of real hardware so you get a few devices implemented through virtio and run on top of that. His blog post on fleet is at http://www.redecho.org/2015/10/01/system-programming-is-fun-...