Comment by inigyou
1 day ago
A kernel panic doesn't bring down the CPU, nor the hard drive, or the RAM, or the power supply unit. So if we're being pedantic, the machine is still up.
1 day ago
A kernel panic doesn't bring down the CPU, nor the hard drive, or the RAM, or the power supply unit. So if we're being pedantic, the machine is still up.
Well, a kernel bug gets write access to everything. A bug in userland is a bit more constrained in what it can do.
That counts especially for accidental bugs and denial of service. To make a userland bug exploited adversarially not impact the rest of the system requires more hardening of the kernel.
Yeah a userland bug just gets all my passwords, SSH keys, personal secrets and whatever.
Say it with me - there's no practical difference.
You are talking about a single user system.
You can compartmentalise further.
Modern processors even give you these 'rings' to help with the hardware side of that, if you want to.
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