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by johnnyjeans 417 days ago
I'm not sure what you're even trying to say. Do you think that formally verified C isn't a thing? Because it's not used in Linux?

Linux isn't designed to be formally verifiable. For all of the manpower and resources dedicated to it, it's still bidden to the technical debt of being a 30 year old hobbyist experiment at its core. If you want a formally verified, secure kernel that wasn't written by a college student to see if he could, seL4 exists.
1 comments
Ygg2 416 days ago
> Do you think that formally verified C isn't a thing? Because it's not used in Linux?

No. It exists but is it practical to be used in an OS? From what I gathered from HN, sel4 is very limited in scope and extending that to a semi-usable OS (that uses ""proven"" C) is expensive time and money wise.

> still bidden to the technical debt of being a 30 year old hobbyist experiment

Citation needed. I admit it has limitations but it's not like the biggest corps in the world aren't working on it.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43452185#43454498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853283

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johnnyjeans 415 days ago
> sel4 is very limited in scope and extending that to a semi-usable OS (that uses ""proven"" C) is expensive time and money wise.

Everything that has to meet a high criteria of safety is like this, yes. For the exact same reason unsafe exists in Rust and completely inescapable, because automatic correctness checking beyond the most trivial static analysis doesn't actually come for free, and it imposes intense design restrictions that make a lot of things very time consuming to do.

> Citation needed

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.minix/c/dlNtH7RRrGA/m/Sw...

You will never find a single point in the multiple archives of Linux's git history where a clean break point occurred and the kernel was greenfielded with the express intent of replacing its design abstractions with ones more appropriate and ergonomic for formal analysis. If you'd like to express further skepticism, feel free to try and find that moment which never happened.

Participation of large, well recognized corporations does not imply the kernel isn't a mess of technical debt. It actually implies worse.

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