alt Hacker NewsWhy is it that every Capability based system seems to be a toolkit for running a single program instead of an OS ready for daily use? Is it just me?
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A lot of OS projects develop the kernel then run out of steam. It's especially hard for capabilities because there's no established standard like Unix/Posix to copy. Capability OSes are still a research topic.
Capability-based operating systems are sufficiently dissimilar to standard ACL operating systems that ordinary software cannot be directly ported without losing some or many of the capability advantages. Furthermore, they are typically very security focused, and so they they've spent a lot of time researching security-focused interfaces and idioms for end users, rather than just re-implementing the hodge-podge of poorly thought out user interfaces that seem to reintroduce the same security vulnerabilities again and again, eg. CSRF is just the "confused deputy" attack known since the 1980s.
I suggest reading some of their stuff [1], it's pretty interesting and accessible.
[1] The EROS Trusted Window System, https://srl.cs.jhu.edu/pubs/SRL2003-05.pdf
Check out Genode Sculpt for a vision of a workable desktop !
It’s capable of dynamic flows, adding and removing programs, has ports of Chromium and Virtual Box. The devs daily drive it :)
It's just you. seL4, CheriBSD, etc., do not fit your description. Neither did KeyKOS itself. You're presumably looking at research prototypes.