On Thu, 13 Sep 2018, Tyrell Jentink wrote:
I'm a young'n; I don't remember 4.4BSD or Research UNIX... I also come to Linux from an IT background, not a Computer Science background, and maybe I lack a certain historical perspective as a consequence.
Tyrell, You're forgiven by us silverbacks.
I was recently reading an article that claimed Linux is insecure, because of it's monolithic kernel codebase: https://threatpost.com/researchers-blame-monolithic-linux-code-base-for-critical-vulnerabilities/136785/
I've not read the above, but many distributions (including Slackware) use modules so you're not loading everything even when some are not needed. Slackware has two kernel versions: generic and huge. The huge kernel has everything, including the kitchen sink, that's loaded when booted. The generic kernels require an initrd (a small initial RAM disk that gets the system started), then only the necessary kernels are loaded. Germane to security, other than potential vulnerabilities which have been patched prior to exploitation, only the recent bind goof exposed potential insecurity. Not only linux, but the *BSDs and the backbones of the Internet are open source software. That's why they are highly secure: there are always folks (including CS100 students) poking and trying to make it crash (as they did with the IBM S/360 at the U. of Illinois in the early 1970s). Hope this helps reassure you. Rich _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
