October 2015 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Multics vs Unix
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 12 Nov '15

12 Nov '15

I’ve been reading the introductory “Multics Concepts and Utilization” book <http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/honeywell/multics/F01_multicsIntroCo…> over at Bitsavers. Multics (the “MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service”) was, for its time, an extremely ambitious operating system project. It was first introduced in 1965, in the form of a series of papers at the AFIPS Fall Joint Computer Conference of that year <http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1965/5066/00/index.html>. Of course, it took far too long (7 years) to reach production quality. In that time, a small group of researchers at AT&T Bell Labs grew tired of waiting, and decided to create their own, less ambitious system, which they called “UNIX” as a tongue-in-cheek homage to “Multics”. And the rest, as they say, is history. But, nevertheless, Multics remained an influential system. There are even some present-day fans of it gathered at <http://multicians.org/>. Apparently they have got the OS booting on an emulator of the original GE 645 hardware. Though it was mostly written in a high-level language (PL/I), Multics was never a portable OS; to support its advanced virtual-memory and security features, it required special processor hardware support which was not common in those days. Even today, Multics has some features which can be considered innovative and uncommon. It may be true that, for example, SELinux can match all of its security capabilities and more. But some aspects of its file-protection system seem, to me, to make sharing of data between users a bit easier than your typical Linux/POSIX-type system. For a start, there seems to be no concept of file “ownership” as such. Or even of POSIX-style file protection modes (read/write/execute for owner/group/world). Instead, all file and directory access is controlled via access-control lists (ACLs). Directories have a permission called “modify”, which effectively gives a matching entity (user, group, process) owner-type rights over that directory; except that more than one entity can have that permission at once. Thus, a group of users working on a common project can all be given this “modify” access to a shared directory for that project, allowing them all to put data there, read it back again, control access to it, delete it etc on a completely equal basis. Contrast this with POSIX/Linux, where every file has to have exactly one owner; even if they create that file in a shared directory, it still gives the creating user a special status over that file, that others with write access to the containing directory do not have. (Multics also offers a separate “append” permission, that allows the possessor to create an item in a directory, without having the ability to remove an item once it’s there.) One radical idea introduced in Unix was its profligate use of multiple processes. Every new command you executed (except for the ones built into the shell) required the creation of a new process, often several processes. Other OSes tended to look askance at this; it seemed somehow wasteful, perhaps even sinful to spawn so many processes so readily and discard them so casually. The more conventional approach was to create a single process at user login, and execute nearly all commands within the context of that. There were special commands for explicitly creating additional processes (e.g. for background command execution), but such process creation did not simply happen as a matter of course. Gradually, over time, the limitations of the single-process approach became too much to ignore, and the versatility of the Unix approach won over (nearly) everybody. Multics, however, is of the old school. More than that, the process even preserves global state, including static storage, in-between runs of programs, and this applies across different programs, not just reruns of the same one. For example, in FORTRAN, there is the concept of a “common block”. If you run two different programs that both refer to the same common block, then the second one will see values left in the block by the first one. To completely reinitialize everything, you need to invoke the “new_proc” command, which effectively deletes your process and gives you a fresh one. One common irritation I find on POSIX/Linux systems is the convention that every directory has to have an entry called “.”, pointing to itself, and one called “..”, pointing to its parent. This way these names can be used in relative pathnames to reach any point in the directory hierarchy. But surely it is unnecessary to have explicit entries for these names cluttering up every directory; why not just build their recognition as a special case into the pathname-parsing logic in the kernel, once and for all? That way, directory-traversal routines in user programs don’t have to be specially coded to look for, and skip these entries, every single time. Multics doesn’t seem to have this problem. An absolute pathname begins with “>” (which is the separator for pathname components, equivalent to POSIX “/”), while a relative pathname doesn’t. Furthermore, a relative pathname can begin with one or more “<” characters, indicating the corresponding number of steps up from the current working directory. Unlike POSIX “..”, you can’t have “<” characters in the middle of the pathname, which is probably not a big loss. It is interesting to see other features which are nearly, but not quite, the same as, corresponding features in Unix. For example, there is a search path for executables, to save you typing the entire pathname to run the program. However, this does not seem as flexible as the $PATH environment-variable convention observed by Unix/POSIX shells. In particular, it does not seem possible to remove the current directory from the search path, which we now know can be a security risk. Another one is the concept of “active functions” and “active strings”. These allow you to perform substitutions of dynamically-computed values into a command line. However, they are not as general as the Unix/POSIX concept of “command substitution”, where an entire shell command can supply its output to be interpolated into another command. Instead of having a completely separate vocabulary of “active functions” which can only be used for such substitutions, Unix/POSIX unifies this with the standard set of commands, any of which can be used in this way. There are other features of Multics that others more familiar with it might want to see mentioned (the single-level store concept, where “everything is a memory segment”, versus Unix “everything is a file”? I/O redirection based on “switches”—symbolic references to files, versus Unix integer “file descriptors”?). But then, this long-winded essay would become even longer-winded :). So if you are interested in this particular piece of computing history, feel free to follow up the links above. In summary, Multics is very much a museum piece, not something you would want to use today for regular work—not in its original form. But I think there are still one or two ideas there that we could usefully copy and adapt to a present-day OS, particularly a versatile one like Linux.

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This 11-year-old is selling cryptographically secure passwords for $2 each
by Peter Reutemann 29 Oct '15

29 Oct '15

"We now live in a world where a New York City sixth grader is making money selling strong passwords. Earlier this month, Mira Modi, 11, began a small business at dicewarepasswords.com, where she generates six-word Diceware passphrases by hand." -- source: http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/10/this-11-year-old-is-selling-cryptog… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Official, Customized Raspberry Pi Versions Coming Soon
by Peter Reutemann 27 Oct '15

27 Oct '15

"The immensely popular Raspberry Pi will soon be offered in customized versions, through an exclusive arrangement between Raspberry Pi Trading and Element14. According to the companies' announcement, Element14 will provide design and manufacturing services to OEM customers to create 'bespoke designs' based upon the Raspberry Pi technology platform. That's weird U.K. English for saying that contracts for creating customized Raspberry Pi SBCs will entail substantial NRE fees and 3,000 to 5,000 unit orders, depending on the nature of the customization. The tweaked Pi's are likely to have revised board layouts, additional or alternative functions, interfaces, connectors, and memory configurations, and more. A handful of unsanctioned Raspberry Pi knock-offs have already appeared over the past couple of years, including various Orange Pi and Banana Pi flavors, which certainly didn't involve any 'bespeaking.' More info is at Element14's CustomPi page." -- source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/10/27/1211234 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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FSF-certified laptop
by Ian Young 27 Oct '15

27 Oct '15

This may be of interest to some. Not sure I want to try this at home except with a machine I don't mind turning into a brick. http://www.fsf.org/news/now-fsf-cerified-to-respect-your-freedom-taurinus-x…

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Intel Develops Linux 'Software GPU' That's ~29-51x Faster
by Peter Reutemann 20 Oct '15

20 Oct '15

"Intel is open-sourcing their work on creating a high-performance graphics software rasterizer that originally was developed for scientific visualizations. Intel is planning to integrate this new OpenSWR project with Mesa to deploy it on the Linux desktop as a faster software rasterizer than what's currently available (LLVMpipe). OpenSWR should be ideal for cases where there isn't a discrete GPU available or the drivers fail to function. This software rasterizer implements OpenGL 3.2 on Intel/AMD CPUs supporting AVX(2) (Sandy Bridge / Bulldozer and newer) while being 29~51x faster than LLVMpipe and the code is MIT licensed. The code prior to being integrated in Mesa is offered on GitHub." -- source: http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/10/20/2213215 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Use GNURoot to install a GNU/Linux distribution on your Android device
by Peter Reutemann 20 Oct '15

20 Oct '15

"How many times have you been on the go and discovered that you needed to pull off some Linux-fu, but the only piece of tech you had was an Android device? Imagine if you were able to fire up a Linux command prompt on that device and make use of apt-get to install whatever command line tool you needed. Wget? No problem. Traceroute? Yes. Ssh? Absolutely. Just about any tool you can install on Linux, you can install within Android. Even some graphical apps will work (even though command line tools work best)." -- source: http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/use-gnuroot-to-install-a-gnulinux-… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Microsoft Publishes OpenSSH For Windows Code
by Peter Reutemann 20 Oct '15

20 Oct '15

"Microsoft has published early source code for its OpenSSH-for-Windows port for developers to pick apart and improve. In a blog post on Monday, Steve Lee – the PowerShell team's principal software engineer manager – said Redmond has finished early work on a Windows port of OpenSSH 7.1, built in a joint-effort with NoMachine. Their rough roadmap from here: 1) Leverage Windows crypto APIs instead of OpenSSL/LibreSSL and run as Windows Service. 2) Address POSIX compatibility concerns. 3) Stabilize the code and address reported issues. 4) Production quality release." -- source: http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/10/20/1925226 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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AGM?
by Peter Reutemann 20 Oct '15

20 Oct '15

Hi everyone I'm proposing this year's AGM to take place on November 23rd, usual place at uni, MS4.G.02. Agenda: - President's Report - Treasurer's Report - Election of 2016 Committee - Consumption of pizza Any comments or things to add to the agenda? Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 20 Oct '15

20 Oct '15

Hi everyone Due to exams starting next week, we don't have access to our usual meeting room up at uni. Therefore we'll just meet at the The Cook for a drink next Monday to discuss all things Linux and Open-Source! More details here: http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/225544297/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Fwd: [NZLUG] Linux Lite banned from TradeMe
by Peter Reutemann 20 Oct '15

20 Oct '15

Apologies, if you've received this already. Cheers, Peter ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: philip Date: Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 12:09 AM Subject: Re: [NZLUG] Linux Lite banned from TradeMe To: nzlug(a)lists.nzoss.org.nz On Wed, 2015-10-14 at 08:32 +1300, Volker Kuhlmann wrote: > In Europe there is a good chance that it would be recognised that a > business like trademe is practically a monopoly, and anti-competitive > behaviour does not go down well with authorities with company > policies > not carrying much weight. E.g. google is permanently under > investigation > for something. > > In New Zealand trademe is essentially a monopoly, and they are > hindering > legitimate local businesses. (Isn't Johnny keen on local business, or > is > that only when overseas companies grease him up first?) You could try > complaining on those grounds, but the commerce commission is not > often > useful. > > Until things change use a better trading platform than tardme, and > don't > waste your time discussing anything with them, their back pockets are > far too fat to need to pay attention to you. > > Volker >From Jerry. Got a call from TradeMe today and they are happy to allow linux distributions to be listed again. This of course goes hand in hand with a pending policy wording review/change. Phil. _______________________________________________ NZLUG mailing list NZLUG(a)lists.nzoss.org.nz http://lists.nzoss.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/nzlug -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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