General Improvements for Sculpt

Sun Feb 14 23:35:07 CET 2021

Hello everyone,

Sorry for the late general reply, but I needed some days to elaborate
on some of my ideas for Sculpt os.

In those days I've tested almost every package available on depot, I
must say some things referred for falkon browser: it is nice and
probably the most interesting software in the entire distribution, but
I think that disabling JS by default could be a really nice step for a
more lightweight approach (which follows sculpt "style"), I've tested
the frames and the browser  speed through online tests and lichess
duels, seems to go quite well, only small downside:
sometimes it tends to stuck or stop the internet connection but is
often a temporary problem, not persistent.
PS I don't know why but when I've done the browser fingerprint, I
found that the browser is effectively installed on Genode, have you
set any identificative User Agent (or similar) for that?

I don't know if  "Chocolate Doom" is the homonymous video game, but
unfortunately I wasn't able to play it cause an infinite "I_init:
setting up machine state", the audio driver was the bsd_audio_drv
while the wm was the themed_wm (internet connection under nic_router),
do you know if I am doing anything wrong? I am not big fans of video
games, but I would like to try it!

Another few general considerations:
the learning curve of Sculpt is pretty fast, I don't know why, but
after few days I increased the feeling with the OS, the documentation
played a fundamental role in it, Have you thought to implement also a
touch screen mode for Sculpt? may be extremely interesting for
smartphones.

One good point is the "inspect" shell, fast and portable, I like it,
only one problem:
too few tools under /bin are available, apart vim, there is not many
things you can do with it, my idea for fixing that could be to add few
more useful tool:
one idea could be the microsed implementation, it is around 25kb and
permits to modify files through Regexp, only downside for this
implementation: still many commands crashes (-e is an example).
(sorry for the zip of the last time, I had not the idea of how peoples
are suspicious on compressed files haha), the files are sed.h,
sedcomp.c, sedexec.c and the relative Makefile;

Another hint: upgrade the md5sum (maybe in the future) to something
more secure, I don't know if Sculpt uses it for more complex (and
security related) tasks but is strongly discouraged.

I started to test the Xoroshiro PRNG you use for the OS internals, in
general is quite secure, it is interesting to see its generation with
a "0" seed. I'll search for some weakness on it in those days.

Final suggestion: One day I tried to install as much software as I can
on Sculpt, the result was quite strange, I wasn't able to scroll down
the Leitz. enviroment, do you know if is possible to do it?
{
the photo is
5ECB60B5-C98C-496D-9A9D-ECB617AD6809
}

Now I have more technical questions:

Josef, I started yesterday studying how Genode handles wifi connections,
it is almost identical to Linux, for the software stack (mac80211 and
cfg80211) but I haven't understood why in firmware.cc ( the text file
you linked to me ), in Fw_list struct some firmware images have NULL
as available name while others have their correspondent name? Are
still unimplemented some models ?
I would like to start writing a software stack for BLE, any hints?
Bluez could be a good starting point but honestly, I have no idea of
how to port it on A non Unix system.

Martin, I've finished the Wikipedia page translation, is the
Wikipedia_it file, I've chosen to write it in Markdown language, let
me know if is good.
I've tried to adjust it as much as I can, let me know (I don't know if
the format is legible by any Markdown interpreter).

Norman,  As the first thing, I've started to port a working Italian
layout keyboard, the current version is in the email attachment (file:
it_IT.chargen), only problem, certain letters are unavailable (like è,
ò, à, ù, § and £), could you try to fix it? the big works for upper
keys is already done and tested, (everything works well).

Another few things to ask:

Do you confirm that Sculpt, for now, has NO API or syscall available?
it would be pretty useful for me to write tools in C with a nice
syscall system, my idea could be to implement a programming language
designed only for this OS which offers both high and low-level
capabilities, (like Inferno's os Limbo programming language), I've
started thinking on it, if you agree, in the next days I can try to
design the main body of it (in PURE c, the best by test).

Replaying the Bluetooth part:
I agree with you, the big advantage you could gain by Bluetooth depot
system consists on the practicality: think that the latest version of
Bluetooth (5.0.X) can trace a device distance measurement by
triangulation and, if we join this to the OBEX protocol, I think that
a secure (and maybe native) application which show the nearest device
which could act as depot server could be an interesting point, also
think on the possible growth of a 24h connected (similar)"peer to
peer" network system for discovering near possible Genode
applications.

[ Yes, not every device support BLE nor Bluetooth 5.0.X but for an
incoming future could be a great idea]

Let me know what you think,

Regards,
Edoardo Mantovani, 2021

--

Edoardo Mantovani
Independent security researcher
email: Baseband at cpan.org
Urbino, Italy
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