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MatejGomboc merged 1 commit into from
Aug 1, 2026
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Add research/0002: virtualisation and containment prior art #15

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17 changes: 17 additions & 0 deletions docs/CHANGELOG.md
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Expand Up @@ -12,6 +12,23 @@ recorded is indistinguishable from law that was never agreed.

### Added

- `docs/research/0002-virtualisation-and-containment-prior-art.md` — the second prior-art review, on
the maintainer's initiative: what the virtualisation and containerisation fields learned under
production fire, mined for Setonix. Six research sweeps (hypervisors/microVMs, container
runtimes/sandboxes, images/supply chain, resource control at scale, plus two critic-identified gaps:
control-plane confused-deputy failures and the path-resolution escape corpus), 69 lessons, primary
sources only, every lesson mapped to a pillar, an obligation by number, or the RFC it feeds.
Verdict: sixteen lessons are production-quantified validation of decisions already made (the
container era's survivors each rebuilt part of Setonix's architecture as a retrofit, at retrofit
prices); the genuinely new inputs are decision-forcing — the store's Merkle naming scheme must be
fixed before the store is built (resolving RFC-0001's open questions 1–3), the broker inherits a
decade of confused-deputy CVEs as design rules plus three proposed obligations (O-21 mediation
auditability, O-22 broker compromise containment, O-23 fail-closed mediation), the scheme
registry's resolution semantics arrive essentially specified (Capsicum/`openat2`: resolve once to
a held capability, by construction, within O-2's calculus), and seL4 MCS's budget-expiry hole
yields a proposed RFC-0004 amendment. Three mechanisms rejected by name (eBPF-style in-kernel
extensibility, command-keyed build caches, a bootstrap superuser); three graves proposed for the
constitution's §3 list, flagged for the maintainer, not taken.
- `docs/research/0001-capabilities-and-ipc-prior-art.md` — a literature and source review that
stress-tests RFC-0003 and RFC-0004 against the systems that already fought these fights (seL4,
Zircon/Fuchsia, KeyKOS/EROS, Barrelfish, CHERI, Genode, QNX, L4, and the Rust-OS field: Tock,
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