Sadly complexity is unavoidable for most real-world usecases. Just see how so many people interested in de-Googled phones balk at the prospect of losing access to banking apps. Telling them to go use an OS that doesn't support Bluetooth isn't going to work, but hopefully you wouldn't say that means they should give up all hope of security.

Abstraction has served us well in managing complexity before. I wouldn't abandon it out of misplaced idealism.

> tone was appropriate

TDR said:

> You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes.

This comment wouldn't survive HN scrutiny. It's a strawman argument, and doesn't address the core point at all: does virtualization improve or degrade security, when taken as a whole?

Adam's response is great, and TDR is smart, but he's been a lightning rod for 20 years for a reason: he was doing hot takes before they were even called that, and this is a great example.

Yeah, I'm with Theo on this one. Conventional OS security between Ring-0 and everything else is well understood; the problem has become too much code in Ring-0, a great fraction of which has its own interfaces across the security boundary, and the Unix security model just doesn't scale.

No capabilities, or even a sane and useful way of adding capabilities with everything in ring 0, and the flat integer namespacing of users and groups just doesn't work for what userspace needs to do today - hence namespaces, which have introduced their own problems, because (no surprise) trying to graft a tree structure onto a flat integer namespace after the fact is a mess.

Virtualization tried to sidestep all that, but to make it fast the cost has been more driver interfaces to host ring-0 - remember what the original was? - and screwing around a whole bunch with particularly arcane facets of the core ring-0 security boundary, e.g. page tables.

It is a mess.