Re: [9fans] novel userspace paradigms introduced by plan 9

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

> > why do you think that the lack of a super user make per-process namespaces
> > work?
> 
> The fact that you own the hardware you are running on means there's no 
> need to provide enhanced priv's (such as root) to protect things like 
> mount(2).  

that's a property of per-process namespaces, not the lack of a root user.

in this sense plan 9 has a limited root—the hostowner that owns the devices
on a machine and is trusted wrt the authentication protocol.

> And if you do something stupid, the only damage you can do is 
> to yourself.  Just look at all the hoops FUSE must jump through to keep 
> people from being able to bodge the entire system.

for some reason, the linux guys have convinced themselves that per process
namespaces can't be done without security problems.  i see no reason that
pam couldn't do plan 9 style authentication with a process running on behalf
of root with its own namespace.

they've changed everything else in unix, why hold so tightly to the clearly
unhelpful ideas?

- erik