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Microsoft Announces Linux-Powered "Azure Sphere" IoT Platform

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  • #31
    Originally posted by stormcrow View Post
    Originally posted by Brophen View Post
    How does one extinguish GPL licensed code
    Patents. You can look at the code all you want, but you can't legally reuse it in the US when it's implementing a patented feature. There's no provisions for patent licensing in the GPL v2 that the Linux kernel uses.
    You're confusing GPL versions. GPLv2 is the one that has patent provisions. That was part of the motivations that lead to version 2 being written.

    (Which, by itself, if microsoft is indeed releasing their own variant of Linux kernel and publishing its GPLv2'ed code, has some interesting implication regarding the exFAT patents, similar to Samsung situation a few years back).

    Originally posted by gnarlin View Post
    Tivoization is how.
    Yup, *that* is the thing which is not covered by GPLv2 (and was part of the motivation toward writing version 3).

    So in theory Microsoft could write a custom Linux kernel, release its code (as per GPLv2), but have key functionality tightly coupled to some hardware key-signing (think TPM) to which they do not to release the keys (unlike GPLv3) so no way for users to upload their own replacement firmware to those IoT devices.

    So Microsoft's range evil doing is pretty limited, and would mostly be stupid: Why lock their own device to community, when people could as well pick-up a $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W that runs mainstream kernel that gives the same peripherals (Wifi, etc.) with perhaps a slightly higher power consumption (100mA idle vs 50mA speculated somewhere online) but a much better CPU performance (1Ghz ARMv6 vs 500Mhz announced for Azure Sphere - their whole reason given as an excuse for going Linux instead of Windows IoT)

    (Note: Raspberry Pi's Broadcom Video Core even has an opensource alternative firmware for the bootload if you only aim for headless use)

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    • #32
      Originally posted by elvenbone View Post

      I get why ACLs are so important on servers, but MS' implementation on at least the desktop versions of Windows is a nightmare from end-user perspective.
      Recently I set up a Windows 10 system for a relative, with the OS installed on a new SSD. The old HDD which previously hosted a Windows OS is now intended as data drive. However i couldn't figure out how to delete the 20GB Windows folder from there. I granted full read-write permissions to the relevant system-owned users and user-owned user accounts. Still no chance to delete that folder. Formatting the drive was not an option for practical reasons concerning user data.
      Not to mention how long applying altered ACL permissions to many files can take.
      I've had similar experiences and I did find the right commands to fix the permissions, but it was a headache and I had to leave some of the commands to take ownership running overnight.

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      • #33
        Originally posted by ssokolow View Post
        Microsoft has actually leap-frogged Linux in various ways (The one that people tend to think of most is the ability to recover from a graphics driver crash
        this has nothing to do with kernel
        Originally posted by ssokolow View Post
        or change graphics drivers without a restart)
        i do it all the time on linux
        Originally posted by ssokolow View Post
        and has put quite a bit of security hardening into the Windows kernel.
        ms pioneered selinux?

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        • #34
          Originally posted by Drago View Post
          Guys, doesn't Intel and AMD DRM drivers have GPU reset capability? Isn't it the same thing as this recovery in Windos?
          right now client apps lose all buffers on gpu reset and need to be able to recover from that
          Last edited by pal666; 17 April 2018, 03:15 PM.

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          • #35
            Originally posted by Danielsan View Post
            They can't extinguish the GPL but they have the resources to distort the way how the others perceive GNU and Linux, as it did for a while Ubuntu when overlapped the meaning of GNU/Linux distro. This is the power of the corporations that can invest money and time on marketing stuff. And it was exactly what has been doing Microsoft overlapping the meaning of personal computer with the Windows brand for a very long time.
            Fir years Microsoft has been sparing no resources trying to do exactly what you say, from the Halloween documents through the sordid SCO affair to the Kinect driver affair and others. The result? Niet, nothing, nada. All these tactics ever achieved was to ultimately embarrass Microsoft, but Linux remained basically completely unaffected. So it seems that Microsoft has finally came to its senses and decided that if they can't beat Linux, then they better join it - and make some money in the process

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            • #36
              Originally posted by jacob View Post
              ...
              No one can forget the Ballmer era, however this friendly approach from MS seems to me more dangerous, try to imagine if every time you see the word Linux you see also the Microsoft brand (like Ubuntu does), I am not saying that MS is going to change, or erase, or something else against Linux, I would to point out that it is trying to associate its brand with Linux to take the scene (I mean its like the "systemd" approach ) which is fully compatible with your words.

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              • #37
                Originally posted by pal666 View Post
                right now client apps lose all buffers on gpu reset and need to be able to recover from that
                Have you seen any app that recovery itself at those cases?

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                • #38
                  Originally posted by Danielsan View Post

                  No one can forget the Ballmer era, however this friendly approach from MS seems to me more dangerous, try to imagine if every time you see the word Linux you see also the Microsoft brand (like Ubuntu does), I am not saying that MS is going to change, or erase, or something else against Linux, I would to point out that it is trying to associate its brand with Linux to take the scene (I mean its like the "systemd" approach ) which is fully compatible with your words.
                  Microsoft in that regard us no different from Google, IBM, Facebook and the hundreds of other companies who, in one way or another, live of Linux. if they are welcome to do it, and Redhat and Canonical can do it, then obviously so must be Microsoft.

                  PS: congratulations for managing to bring up systemd in a thread about Microsoft's IoT projects ;-)

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                  • #39
                    Originally posted by pal666 View Post
                    this has nothing to do with kernel
                    i do it all the time on linux
                    Er... how, exactly do you do that? Killing X or Wayland, switching to text mode, changing the driver and restarting gfx doesn't count. The whole point is to be able to reinstall your gfx driver with your desktop active and all your graphical apps open and undisturbed.

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                    • #40
                      Originally posted by jacob View Post
                      Other than that, I don't see any security feature in Windows that Linux doesn't already do better. Its hardening possibilities go way beyond what most other OSes, particularly Windows, can offer.
                      Hardening possibilities, yes. I'm honestly wondering how many of Microsoft's enhancements are copies of things grsecurity and/or PaX do which haven't reached mainline.

                      Originally posted by RomuloP View Post

                      If they really had pioneered it in Windows I believe it should have been a Windows kernel... Honestly they still don't have anything similar to seccomp for example... Anyway, the ability of recovering the GPU drive is great on desktops, this is true, but not on servers, you don't want it to reset your driver because as intentioned a CUDA program dominates your GPU.
                      I never said they pioneered it. When I said they leap-frogged Linux, I basically meant in terms of mainlined, in-use-by-default implementations of things.

                      I suspect Microsoft's innovations in this field are things that have been in grsecurity or PaX for longer than Microsoft has been using them, but still haven't made it into mainline.

                      Originally posted by pal666 View Post
                      i do it all the time on linux
                      You were able to swap out your X11 drivers without having to restart your running X applications back in the Windows Vista era? That's the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say that Microsoft leapfrogged the Linux ecosystem.

                      (And, no, a GUI equivalent to GNU Screen doesn't qualify, any more than running all your Windows applications through RDP does.)

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