The truth is, I 100% agree with you. When there are millions of lines of code it is a black box the community will never be able to fully review.
This conversation has made me now double down on wanting get a feature phone with as little code as possible that can be audited.
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The whole idea of ever having fully community reviewed and open devices without single points of failure when there is 250gb of source code to build android... who has time to build it let alone review it?
The leaner the tree, the better chance of useful decentralized review.
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> there is 250gb of source code to build android
No, there isn't.
> who has time to build it let alone review it?
How exactly do you plan on doing any meaningful review of the Linux kernel, no one else is doing either? Also, a browser engine has more code + more time to build.
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You are not hearing me. I agree with you.
I want to start ripping things out, and eventually rip out the kernel too.
The modern smartphone approach has too much bloat to ever be fully reviewed or trusted in the way I want.
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Yeah, and so does Linux, or Chromium. You certainly can't use an ARM SoC which is actually largely a black box (unlike a closed source library where you have all the unobfuscated, simply compiled code, and could review it in the that form, which may even be better for your goal).
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So, no web browser with what you want to do, and definitely no massive monolithic kernel with immense intertwined complexity like Linux. It's far harder to review Linux than even 10x or more code spread out into small components with clear boundaries and APIs.
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You seem to have a very warped idea of how code review works and what it accomplishes, especially if there is actually supposed to be understanding of the code as a whole, and full review of all of it. That's just not realistic for a project like Linux or a web rendering engine.
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No team is ever going to be able to fully review and understand a project like Linux. It is beyond human understanding / capabilities. It's immensely complex without clear boundaries between different things. No one is even attempting to do any kind of full picture review of it.
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As I have said several times now, I do not think anyone stands a chance of fully reviewing or auditing the Linux kernel.
I do however see that as a placeholder while everything else gets stripped down.
I want the Linux kernel replaced with a microkernel.
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It's not something that can simply be replaced with a drop-in replacement unless that includes running the Linux kernel on top of it or using gVisor which is what we are considering doing in the long term for GrapheneOS. You'll be building around how Linux and *nix works.
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If app compat with an existing platform is a non-goal, it doesn't really fit. There are projects and companies developing devices meant to be secure in a much more meaningful way. I do not think it can be built on the Linux kernel, and definitely not any major Linux distribution.
If the Linux kernel is the core of the OS, then I don't think all this concern about the possibility of backdoors, etc. makes much sense at all. There are far bigger problems. There are plentiful critical severity code execution bugs and it's probably getting worse, not better.
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Every major release of the Linux kernel adds substantial complexity and attack surface. Components get increasingly complex with the focus on ever increasing features and performance through complexity. Added mitigations hardly accomplish anything in the grand scheme of things.
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You can get Linux way way more hardened than any Linux distro that exists today. An immutable squashfs statically compiled into the kernel to get a bare minimal mvp... Then port the user space to something even leaner. Gvisor etc may help for sure.
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That's userspace hardening, not kernel hardening, and the kernel is by far the biggest issue even with a richly functional userspace like Android. Kernel vulnerabilities are the majority of the severe ones and are part of most real world attacks. It's the easiest way out of the
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