[sugar] perceived sugar performance

[Eben Eliason]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 2:34 PM, Michael Stone <michael at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 02:15:54PM -0400, Paul Fox wrote:
>  > michael wrote:
>  >  > Personally, I have found extensible autostart mechanisms which process
>  >  > third-party data to be more useful to trojan authors than to users so
>  >  > I'm mildly inclined to consider such mechanisms to be a misfeatures
>  >
>  > really?  i'm not sure where the "third-party" data comes into it.  i
>  > suppose with browse, maybe, but my .xsession has started two xterms on
>  > my desktop for many years, and i've never considered it a security
>  > issue.  just a time-saver.
>
>  Depends. Any software you run can write to your .xsession, yes?
>  Afterward, will you really notice an extra instance of 'bash', or
>  'kdmgd', or some other nonsense running in the background, capturing all
>  your keystrokes, aliasing 'sudo', running 'xauth ++', setting up a
>  spambot, or querying an IRC server for recent local root exploits?
>
>  Actually, an even more compelling demonstration of the problem comes
>  from the Windows world. Consider the Windows 'Start' directory, the
>  Windows registry hives which list both autostarted "user programs" and
>  "services", automatically loaded drivers, corruption of Word's
>  normal.dot template, and Windows' tendency to automatically run software
>  it that it locates on data CDs. I have seen every single one of these
>  mechanisms used to cause substantial mischief. All of them amount to an
>  automatic "run this software" API. Often, there are ways to have the
>  software run silently, run in a fashion that users are unable to kill,
>  run steganographically, etc. As I said - in my honest opinion, it's a
>  misfeature rather than a feature.
>
>  "Third party" comes into it because parsing untrusted data is such a
>  dangerous operation, particularly when the parsers are written in a
>  non-memory-safe language (as most of them are, "for performance"). For
>  this reason, both the Journal and Telepathy really scare me because they
>  run automatically and parse data from lots of third party sources.
>
>
>  >  > Also, where does hibernation fit in your taxonomy?
>  >
>  > i'd think that's pretty different -- coming out of hibernation
>  > should leave the system exactly as it was when it went in.
>  > (unless i'm misunderstanding.)
>
>  You understood correctly. It has been previously proposed that we should
>  (more or less) always hibernate. I was curious if you had thought about
>  the resulting system.

Interesting.  To clarify for myself, you're actually asking "what if a
normal reboot was treated as though it were hibernation", such that
the next time the laptop boots I find myself where I left off?"  On
one hand, this sounds like a fantastic idea.  On the other hand, it
could be that I rebooted specifically to get myself out of some bad
state, in which case I might not want it to relaunch 5 activities
which are going to bring the system to a crawl upon booting. (But
maybe I misunderstood you...)

Something that is certainly much more valid is to hibernate in the
battery-dies case.  In other words, if the battery reaches a
critically low state and the computer needs to turn off, it should
allow enough time to hibernate such that the full state can be
recovered when a poer cable, or a new battery.  That I am a strong
advocate for.

- Eben