[ale] The future of the operating system

[Leam Hall]

On 12/20/18 10:24 AM, Jonathan Meek wrote:
> It would be an interesting experiment to have it hosted on openBSD.

I thought about this more after I wrote it. I enjoyed NetBSD back in my 
Sparc days, way too fast! The "portable code" thing was enticing as 
well. OpenBSD's security focus, if you ignored issues with Theo, was a 
good selling point.

That said, I don't really know enough about the network stacks and 
defensive configurations to get much past the hype. IN THEORY they are 
better for infrastructure appliance type things like mail, DNS, etc.

In practice, absent systemd, I think a Linux based trimmed down 
configuration could provide much of the same benefits as Open/NetBSD. 
Maybe not to 100% but close. Something like "Linux From Scratch" 
specifically configured for performant and secure networking.

My gut feel is that commercial server grade Linux will wane as 
containers grow, and the container host OS will become more important. 
Given Rich Kulawiec's commentary on security, the elimination of "unused 
capabilities" in an OS image is a good thing. Containers would seem to 
do that well. A container OS would be a different beast than a general OS.

So, to those of you who know more; can a Linux build be customized to be 
as secure by default is OpenBSD and as network stack performant as 
NetBSD? What do you see as the 5-10 year future of the server OS?