usbarmory VS gvisor

Niklaus Wirth, rest his soul, would disagree.

Like would the the selling USB Armory, with Go written firmware.

https://www.withsecure.com/en/solutions/innovative-security-...

Back in my day, writing compilers and OS services were also systems programming.

Not only you can fit Go into a kernel, there is at least two products that do so.

TamaGo, used to write the firmware used in USB armory.

https://www.withsecure.com/en/solutions/innovative-security-...

TinyGo, which even has official Arduino and ARM support, and is sponsored by Google

https://tinygo.org/

Ah but that isn't proper Go! Well neither is the C code that is allowed to be used in typical kernel code, almost nothing from ISO C standard library is available, and usually plenty of compiler specific language extensions are used instead.

> Since 80s everybody designs systems on top of C.

More like since the 1990's, and mostly thanks to the GNU Manifesto and FOSS uptake that took the steam out of C++ adoption being pushed by Apple, IBM and Microsoft.

There is firmware in production written in Go,

https://www.withsecure.com/en/solutions/innovative-security-...

Not exactly but close. No gocoin, but custom (minimal) client based on btcsuite libs. And it is run on USB Armory SoC.

Relocking with your own key is only for experts, it's similar to the USB Armory device for embedded electronics. If you get it wrong you can brick the device, the purpose of doing it is to protect against certain types of boot attacks (like if somebody can get temporary physical access to your phone or even just plant a malicious USB cable which could potentially push malware. If you don't know what you're doing, stay on stock OS.

Plenty of software that is written in C and C++, can be easily done in Go as well, in fact in any AOT compiled managed language.

C++ was born to write distributed systems, nowadays it hardly matters on cloud native infrastructure beyond the OS and hypervisors layer.

This is how Go can be a competitor to C and C++, just like Inferno was basically Plan 9 with Limbo for userspace and very little C beyond the kernel.

And then there are those crazy folks that believe they should ship bare metal AOT compiled languages regardless of others think.

https://www.withsecure.com/en/solutions/innovative-security-...

Of course it can, there are companies shipping products written in bare metal Go.

https://www.withsecure.com/en/solutions/innovative-security-...

https://github.com/usbarmory/tamago

Isn't gVisor kind of this as well?

"gVisor is an application kernel for containers. It limits the host kernel surface accessible to the application while still giving the application access to all the features it expects. Unlike most kernels, gVisor does not assume or require a fixed set of physical resources; instead, it leverages existing host kernel functionality and runs as a normal process. In other words, gVisor implements Linux by way of Linux."

https://github.com/google/gvisor

This sort of feels like seeing someone riding a bike and saying: why don’t they just get a car? The simple fact is that containers and VMs are quite different. Whether something uses VMX and friends or not is also a red herring, as gVisor also “rolls it own VMM” [1].

[1] https://github.com/google/gvisor/tree/master/pkg/sentry/plat...

There's two major production-ready Go-based operating system(-ish) projects:

- Google's gVisor[1] (a re-implementation of a significant subset of the Linux syscall ABI for isolation, also mentioned in the article)

- USBArmory's Tamago[2] (a single-threaded bare-metal Go runtime for SOCs)

Both of these are security-focused with a clear trade off: sacrifice some performance for memory safe and excellent readability (and auditability). I feel like that's the sweet spot for low-level Go - projects that need memory safety but would rather trade some performance for simplicity.

[1]: https://github.com/google/gvisor

[2]: https://github.com/usbarmory/tamago

It uses gVisor to create a TCP/IP stack in userspace, and starts a wireguard interface on it, which the HTTP server from http.Serve listens on. The library will print a URL after startup, where you can access your server. You can create multiple listeners in one binary.

The playground compiles the program with GOOS=linux, GOARCH=amd64 and runs the program with gVisor. Detailed documentation is available at the gVisor site.

You could use a container sandbox like gVisor, light virtual machines as containers (Kata containers, firecracker + containerd) or full virtual machines (virtlet as a CRI).