Hi Alex, CloudABI sounds interesting. I recall working on something vaguely similar at Google, for App Engine. But we didn't go so far as what you are doing here: changing the type of sys.path for example will instantly break so much Python code that it's not even possible to think about it. If you are serious about getting patches reviewed they should probably go in the bug tracker (presumably there are some things that are less controversial than the sys.path change). If you want your API changes discussed I recommend trying python-ideas first, people there are more open to new and different things. In the mean time, good luck with CloudABI. --Guido On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 4:59 AM, Alex Willmer <alex@moreati.org.uk> wrote:
Morning all, I'm writing to introduce myself and a port of CPython 3.6 to a CloudABI.
The port is reaching the point where it might be of interest to others. Namely it ran it's first .py script yesterday during the EuroPython scripts. Having said that it's still very early days, the patches do horrible things - particularly to the import machinery.
I writing this to raise awareness, and open discussions. I'd love to answer any questions/comments you might have.
Background:
# What is CloudABI? CloudABI is a POSIX-like platform, with Capability based Security applied. At the syscall/libc layer functions which perform IO or acquire resources without a pre-existing file descriptor (e.g. open(), stat(), bind() etc) are removed. All IO operations must be performed through functions that accept a file descriptor, or a path relative to an fd.
In this way descriptors server as capability tokens. All such tokens are provided to a process when it is spawned. If none are provided then the program in question is limited to just pure computation & memory allocation. Even stdin, stdout & stderr are not provided by default.
# Why bother with CloudABI? It makes it possible to isolate programs from the OS, without resorting to e.g. containers. Possibly even to run untrusted binaries. A compromised CloudABI process can only damaged the things it has access to e.g. a transcoding job can only read the provided input and write to the provided output. It couldn't read /etc/passwd, or try to brute force SSH. This kind of isolation is still possible with UNIX, but it's not the default - which makes it rare.
Personally, I find it interesting. I like the fact that CloudABI processes can be run by unprivileged users - unlike containers. The no-default-global-resources nature makes it easier to write code that can be tested. The fd provided to a webapp doesn't have to be a TCP socket, it could be a domain socket, or just a file stream.
# What is the state of Python for CloudABI? Python for CloudABI is a proof of concept. The port takes the form of a number of patches to CPython 3.6.0a3. These mostly add autoconf & #ifdef entries for POSIX API functions that CloudABI deliberately does not support.
A few differences make their way through Python code, for instance - sys.path is a list of file descriptors, rather than a list of strings - sys.executable is None - sys.argv is not present - The uid and gid entries of stat tuples are set to None (like on Windows)
I got print('Hello World', file=...) working about a month ago, and executed my first .py file yesterday (commit pending).
The current TODO list is - Finish script support - Module execution (python -m) support - zipimport support for file descriptors - ssl support - patch cleanup - try to run test suite
There is no Python 2.x support, and I don't plan to add any.
# What's the state of CloudABI? CloudABI runs on FreeBSD, NetBSD, macOS and Linux. For now it requires a patched kernel on Linux; FreeBSD 11 will include it out the box. Various libraries/packages have been ported (e.g. curl, libpng, x265, lua, libressl).
# What's the history of CloudABI? The project started about 2 years ago. Ed Schouten is the project leader & creator. I became involved this year, having seen a talk by Ed at CCC around new year.
# Where can I get more info? - https://nuxi.nl - CloudABI homepage, including Ed Schouten's CCC talk - http://slides.com/alexwillmer/cloudabi-capability-security - My EP2016 talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlUtkBa8tK8&feature=youtu.be&t=49m - https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudlibc - https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudabi-ports - https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudabi-ports/tree/master/packages/python - #cloudabi on Efnet IRC
Regards, Alex -- Alex Willmer <alex@moreati.org.uk> _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/guido%40python.org
-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)