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pianopatrick • today at 1:29 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

Because the large corporations that fund Linux development and use Linux value speed over security.

Speed requires a lot of code in the kernel, where that code can run fast.

There are kernels that do not have a thousand privilege escalation exploits. These kernels are smaller and much easier to check for bugs. But those kernels are significantly slower.

For many use cases, slower is not a problem. But for the large corporations who fund a lot of Linux development and use Linux in large data centers, every 1% slower can literally be millions of dollars worth of additional servers that are required.

OpenBSD shows that you can have a Unix security model without a thousand privilege escalation exploits. But OpenBSD is like 10% slower. So corporations won't use it because it would cost millions of dollars more per year and some of their software requires access that OpenBSD does not grant precisely because that access leads to security exploits (i.e. io_uring, eBPF etc. etc.)

You could also use like seL4, but that's slow too

So that's why. It's a business tradeoff between cost of servers vs cost of getting hacked, and cost of servers wins.


Replies

Gigachad • today at 1:46 AM

It also used to just be fine patching the bugs as they were found. Its only recently where that model has fallen apart and we now need to prevent the bugs from existing in the first place.

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wormius • today at 2:36 AM

I'm pro OpenBSD, but the question to me seems: Has this been tested via the same means as these new Linux exploits?

I'm also pretty hostile to AI, but do recognize that these machines seem to be very good at finding exploits.

I'm sure there've been some some projects out there working to pentest/find cracks in OpenBSD via LLMs/agents/whatever-the-right-term-would-be...

But it is true the attack surface is much lower in OpenBSD on purpose, so hopefully it is overall more secure. But I'd like to see the numbers.

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