Talk:Singularity (operating system)

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This article needs more context around or a better explanation of technical details to make it more accessible to general readers and technical readers outside the specialty, without removing technical details. See below for more information.


The concepts of "unsafe" and "safe mode" should be explained in this article since they're obviously not very common terms. -- intgr 16:48, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Linked each to type safety to provide context. Vesta 03:06, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Also, does this operating system assume that the virtual machine executing the code is 100% bulletproof? Since it seems that you can circumvent any restrictions once you manage to gain control of the virtual machine, and thus also control the entire operating system as you see fit. -- intgr 16:48, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

I don't see what you're getting at. Microsoft uses a JIT compiler rather than a virtual machine. Vesta 03:06, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
I think they're called virtual machines whether they compile the bytecode into native code or interpret it, but I guess that is debatable. Either way, JIT compilers are not necessarily completely secure. The optimizations performed by the compiler can create plenty of loopholes that can be used to trick the compiler into executing malformed or custom-crafted machine code. So I'm asking if hypothetically one of such bugs could be used to gain control of the entire virtual machine. -- intgr 17:47, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
Such a bug can probably be exploited to gain control of the entire machine, not just the VM. Let's hope that the developers build the compiler correctly. :) -- Vesta 02:11, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
In one of their videos they mentioned this. They plan on moving from "trusting" Bartok to compiling to some kind of typed assembly language. That way the actual byte code can be verified. -- Jmacdonagh 02:00, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
In fact it could be theoricaly possible to create a prooved implementation. However such a task is pretty complex. A Typed Assembly Language such as TALx86 could indeed be used to detect some compilation bugs. It is important to note that even with Typed Assembly Language, security holes are still possible. Nevertheless such an architecture would result in far more security holes than typical 'modern' OS.--debackerl 18:18, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Shouldn't we mention JNode here? it is more or less the same thing, but in java. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 57.79.167.12 (talk • contribs).

[edit] Overly Technical

I added the overly technical box since an average user would have no idea what's going on in this article. Nrbelex (talk) 21:30, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

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