[Info-vax] VMS x86 performance ?

[Simon Clubley]

On 2020-10-30, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) <helbig at asclothestro.multivax.de> wrote:
> In article <rnhl9b$rio$2 at dont-email.me>, Simon Clubley
><clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> writes: 
>
>> On 2020-10-30, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>> >
>> > I don't think VSI will feel insulted if I say they are not one of the
>> > worlds largest IT companies.
>> >
>> 
>> They might. :-)
>> 
>> VSI claim that out of all the operating systems produced in the world,
>> theirs is the most secure.
>> 
>> They might not appreciate you bringing them back down to Earth. :-)
>
> So which one is the most secure?
>

First off, it most certainly is not VMS.

However, the above is a good question. We can't talk about the "most secure"
because it's impossible to know that, but we can talk about "more secure
than VMS".

I would consider z/OS to be way more secure that VMS.

Linux suffers from having a monolithic and fully privileged kernel address
space in the same way as VMS but it also has features that VMS doesn't
which make it more secure. At one level, it has KASLR, and at the other
end of the scale it has full mandatory access control capabilities in the
form of SELinux. It also has other security and isolation features that
VMS does not.

Microkernel based operating systems are by design more secure because much
of the kernel/privileged attack surface is pushed into normal user-level
processes. This goes even further with formally verified microkernel designs
such as SeL4.

I would also argue that a system which is heavily probed by security
researchers is more secure than one which is not, because the researchers
find, and hence force to be fixed, issues that would otherwise remain
undiscovered.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.