Subj : Re: linux permissions issue
To : tenser
From : scarface
Date : Tue Sep 02 2025 08:42 am
te> Plan 9 did away with it entirely. There, a "host owner" is just a normal
te> user who has access to the hardware resources of a given host, but
te> that's it: host owners can't bypass file permissions. If I log into a
te> terminal, for example, then I "own" that machine. Per-process file
te> namespaces are sort of like capabilities (I had a long discussion with
te> Ben Laurie about this at one point, and we agreed they were more or
te> less isomorphic to e.g. Capsicum-style capabilities), so you can
te> easily fence off what a program like a web browser sees and has access
te> to. It was a nice system; shame it never really caught on. Some of the
te> good ideas made it into Linux, but are poor imitations of the original.
It's really sad that plan 9 never really took off. If someone were to start again, what feature(s) from plan 9 do you think would be essential to copy?
