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by Batman867530914 hours ago |
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upvoteby binsquare1 hours ago|
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I work on making this a reality with an embeddable VM.

Performance doesn't have to be supbar, infact with the right properties and focus on being lightweight - I see 90% of native performance.

I work on this as context: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm

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upvoteby stingraycharles14 hours ago|
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Aren’t you then just moving the responsibility from OS (process isolation) to the CPU ? And doesn’t this whole thing break with practical realities, such as processes needing to interact with each other ?

How would you deal with a password manager or a clipboard in these cases, for example, without increasing friction for users ?

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upvoteby Batman867530913 hours ago|
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> And doesn’t this whole thing break with practical realities, such as processes needing to interact with each other ?

There will always be advantages and disadvantages to all of this. But the general idea is to protect the "core" OS, and for that virtualization is superior to anything else you could try really. Android and iOS are already built to isolate apps from one another. ChromeOS uses Crostini to run Linux programs in a VM, etc.

> without increasing friction

That's always the compromise with an Antivirus, isn't it? The logical thing would be to build password managers into the OS, or maybe even to handle them differently. As they are already done in Android and iOS today.

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upvoteby mitxela8 hours ago|
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Processes are already hardware paravirtualization, and some early implementations even called them VMs. However, https://xkcd.com/2044/ is inescapable.
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upvoteby j16sdiz12 hours ago|
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Sandbox or virtualize everything does not eliminate the need to share data. Something control that permission, and it is the weakest link.

Either you end up with something don't work, too lax, or just DoS the user with permission dialog.

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