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Fuchsia, a new operating system

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Re: Fuchsia, a new operating system

#131

Post by Negitivefrags »

jpfed wrote: post #130
Negitivefrags wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A way that I have had the idea of this explained is this. There are two ways to experience most colours. Take yellow. You could experience yellow by seeing pure yellow light which is at the yellow wavelength. The other way to experience yellow is by seeing a mixture of red and green wavelength light. Your eye can't tell the difference between these two types of yellow. The yellow as reflected off a banana is "real" y…

I don't understand why a single wavelength would be considered the "real" stimulus that results in a color perception while other metamers for that perception are somehow less "real".

That's why I put "real" in quotes. There isn't really another single word I can think of that gets the idea across.

Re: Fuchsia, a new operating system

#132

Post by duskwuff »

cyphar wrote: post #67
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #29

> It is good alternative to commercial offerings like FreeRTOS [1] FreeRTOS is GPL with an exception for static linking making it effectively free if you make no modifications. There is, however, an onerous clause prohibiting the publication of comparative benchmarks. [2] [1] https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/magenta/+/HEAD/docs/mg_and_... [2] http://www.freertos.org/license.txt

> FreeRTOS is GPL with an exception for static linking making it effectively free if you make no modifications. There is, however, an onerous clause prohibiting the publication of comparative benchmarks. [2] This is why I don't like the GPLv2 and wish more people would switch to the GPLv3. Section 6 of the GPLv2 implies that you can remove the restrictions you mentioned from the license, but section 7 and 10 of the G…

> Also, "effectively free if you make no changes" doesn't make sense -- free software requires you to have the freedom to make changes to the software.

The GPL places some conditions on distribution; most notably, anyone distributing binaries is required to also make the source available. In the "standard" GPL, this applies even if the distributed binaries are compiled directly from the upstream source -- this is sometimes used as a "gotcha" to harass companies that use GPLed code (e.g, in embedded devices), but which fail to make every single piece of source code available for download. The exception granted by FreeRTOS makes perfect sense in this light.

Re: Fuchsia, a new operating system

#133

Post by Barrin92 »

hinkley wrote: post #54
vacri wrote: post #32

Well, if it takes off, it'll have the side-effect of getting more people to be able to spell 'Fuchsia' correctly...

Easy to remember if you know that fuchsia is named after a German botanist by the name of Leonhart Fuchs. (Lionheart Fox, how badass is that name?)

or if you're German!

('hart' translates to 'tough' or 'brave' though, not heart. The German equivalent would be 'Herz')

Re: Fuchsia, a new operating system

#134

Post by steveklabnik »

oshepherd wrote: post #129
steveklabnik wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redox is microkernelish, and used to have a lot of unsafe, but has cut it down significantly. You'd be surprised :) That said, this is pretty much an open research question at this point, so you're right to be skeptical. (I would also argue that unsafe Rust has more _unspecified_ behavior than C, but not more undefined behavior, but until we get those semantics truly nailed down, can't say for sure. See above "open r…

I took a quick peek at the redox source code and found kernel mode audio and network drivers. This is not a microkernel. As for UB: Maybe it has less, but that which exists (e.g. noalias on mut refs) is very dangerous.

Yes, they're in the middle of some refactoring stuff; they had to put some things back in the kernel. Should be back out when they're done.

Re: Fuchsia, a new operating system

#135

Post by dhasenan »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #29

> It is good alternative to commercial offerings like FreeRTOS [1] FreeRTOS is GPL with an exception for static linking making it effectively free if you make no modifications. There is, however, an onerous clause prohibiting the publication of comparative benchmarks. [2] [1] https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/magenta/+/HEAD/docs/mg_and_... [2] http://www.freertos.org/license.txt

A license covers copying and distribution. You can reject the FreeRTOS license and publish benchmarks. You will lose your ability to distribute FreeRTOS under their variant of the GPL.

They could alternatively add a clause that forces you to extract an agreement from anyone you distribute the source code to. That would require at least some sort of click through license agreement to be binding.

Re: Fuchsia, a new operating system

#137

Post by rincebrain »

slavik81 wrote: post #72
cyphar wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, you couldn't because it's not GPL. It's a license that is nearly identical to the GPL, but slightly different. Then they actually are not allowed to call it the "GNU General Public License" (or in fact, they are not allowed to modify the license terms). It's the first condition in the license text of the GPL, I'm surprised their lawyers didn't notice that little chestnut.

You clearly have a better understanding of this issue than I do. My reading was that they were calling theirs the "FreeRTOS open source license", and it just referenced the GPL.

Given that their exception explicitly contains the quote "Linking FreeRTOS with other modules is making a combined work based on FreeRTOS. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License V2 cover the whole combination.", I feel like they've not got much leg to stand on with that claim.

Re: Fuchsia, a new operating system

#138

Post by swetland »

spikengineer wrote: post #110
mckillop wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It runs on some Broadwell and Skylake hardware. Docs are coming for http://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/series/switchalpha12 .

What about AMD hardware? Will you support all x86_64?

There's no intention not to. Might need a little work to play nice with AMD, but probably not a lot.

Re: Fuchsia, a new operating system

#139

Post by cyphar »

duskwuff wrote: post #132
cyphar wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FreeRTOS is GPL with an exception for static linking making it effectively free if you make no modifications. There is, however, an onerous clause prohibiting the publication of comparative benchmarks. [2] This is why I don't like the GPLv2 and wish more people would switch to the GPLv3. Section 6 of the GPLv2 implies that you can remove the restrictions you mentioned from the license, but section 7 and 10 of the G…

> Also, "effectively free if you make no changes" doesn't make sense -- free software requires you to have the freedom to make changes to the software. The GPL places some conditions on distribution; most notably, anyone distributing binaries is required to also make the source available. In the "standard" GPL, this applies even if the distributed binaries are compiled directly from the upstream source -- this is som…

> In the "standard" GPL

This is only true for GPLv2. GPLv3 fixed this problem, as well as many other real problems (though I don't agree that it is as big of a problem as you claim).

> The exception granted by FreeRTOS makes perfect sense in this light.

Which exception is that? I read it as "this is kinda like the LGPL, but you also can't be 'competitive'". Also, none of this has anything to do with the statement "effectively free if you make no changes". Requiring you to provide the source does not make the software non-free.

Re: Fuchsia, a new operating system

#140

Post by sangnoir »

zigzigzag wrote: post #84
colemickens wrote: post #30

Written in C. What a shame. edit: Thank you to all of the repliers, I had no idea that most OSes were written in C. Er, actually, I'm more than well aware of that fact and I'm familiar with the number of CVEs that have occurred over the years because of the lack of memory safety involved in that C code. Sorry, I simply don't get the appeal of writing more operating systems and network-exposed code that isn't written…

Why is this voted down? To build a new OS from scratch takes a huge effort. If you're going to do it then you should really try to advance the state of the art in big ways. An obvious way to do that is to use memory safe / managed code as deep as possible into the stack (and then you can do things like eliminate the notion of a process entirely). JNode is an example of the latter. Redox has a less radical architectur…

> To build a new OS from scratch takes a huge effort. If you're going to do it then you should really try to advance the state of the art in big ways

I do not get the impression that Fuchsia is a "research project", and it's purpose is not to advance the state of the art.

> When Microsoft did their own new OS research project, Midori, that's the path they walked.

How did it work out for them?

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