Fuchsia: a new operating system
1–10 of 324 posts
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#2While this is a cool project, I can't really see it making financial sense...
> Lets throw away the last 20 years development on the linux kernel by thousands of people, and rewrite our own.
> How much will it cost?
> Ooh - I dunno - If you lend me 1000 engineers, we should be done in about 10 years, cos we're really smart and don't need to implement legacy SCSI support...
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#3While this is a cool project, I can't really see it making financial sense... > Lets throw away the last 20 years development on the linux kernel by thousands of people, and rewrite our own. > How much will it cost? > Ooh - I dunno - If you lend me 1000 engineers, we should be done in about 10 years, cos we're really smart and don't need to implement legacy SCSI support...
Linux is humongous. I don't know about what Google is trying to achieve with Fuschia, but I if you're willing to make trade-offs, I believe you can make an OS that is multiple order of magnitudes smaller than Linux (or other Unixes, or Windows) and still makes a lot of practical sense.
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#4While this is a cool project, I can't really see it making financial sense... > Lets throw away the last 20 years development on the linux kernel by thousands of people, and rewrite our own. > How much will it cost? > Ooh - I dunno - If you lend me 1000 engineers, we should be done in about 10 years, cos we're really smart and don't need to implement legacy SCSI support...
> How much will it cost?
Good thing it's funded by someone who has lots and lots of money!
> Lets throw away the last 20 years development on the linux kernel by thousands of people, and rewrite our own.
To suggest that linux is as good as it gets is a mistake. Operating systems are challenging to write, but certainly not impossible. If you're Google, you see big security risks involved in Linux's design. Google tries to mitigate some of those by funding oss-fuzz and a ton of other great options that narrow the opportunity for exploits. But what if you could write your own OS and make particular security guarantees as a design goal?
Google has already designed and/or reimplemented almost every aspect of the OS excluding the OS kernel.
The biggest drawback for starting a new OS is generally the cost of porting existing software to the new OS.
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#5What makes Fuchsia different then so many other attempts at writing a new OS? They aren't writing a new OS, at least, not in the complete sense.
They are using the IPC system developed in and extracted from Chrome. They are drawing everything in userspace with fast graphics render but the logic for all system components written in Dart from the Flutter project. They use musl for the libc. They are using the little kernel for the core kernel.
As a long time Linux desktop user myself, I'm really excited about this project. A secure desktop without tons of system calls? Userspace graphics? Not HTML/JS based? But could still be used for development? Yes Please!
It's really easy to compile and get it running. Try it out!
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#6While this is a cool project, I can't really see it making financial sense... > Lets throw away the last 20 years development on the linux kernel by thousands of people, and rewrite our own. > How much will it cost? > Ooh - I dunno - If you lend me 1000 engineers, we should be done in about 10 years, cos we're really smart and don't need to implement legacy SCSI support...
UNIX, as a viable OS model, isn't the last word in operating system design. It has too much design decisions and other baggage rooted in technology dating back to the 1970s. As Rob Pike, one of the people who worked on UNIX, said "Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad."
On top of that, Linux essentially sucked all the air out of the UNIX development space by killing off all the commercial UNIXes. Carrying Linux forward rests largely on the shoulders of the kernel team and whatever contributions other businesses feel like making.
So where is the next major OS coming from? Google and Microsoft are the last two companies with the talent to build a future OS and enough resources and clout to push it enough to get traction. (In theory, it could also come from the community but people like Linus only come along once in a generation.)
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#7While this is a cool project, I can't really see it making financial sense... > Lets throw away the last 20 years development on the linux kernel by thousands of people, and rewrite our own. > How much will it cost? > Ooh - I dunno - If you lend me 1000 engineers, we should be done in about 10 years, cos we're really smart and don't need to implement legacy SCSI support...
Pretty cheap if it ends up saving the Android ecosystem.
Android is maybe using 10% of the functionality in the linux kernel but is paying all the overhead and friction of maintaining a branch for each and every device.
I think google wants to heavily encapsulate the hardware vendors drivers and customizations and provide a stable API so google can pretty much update devices with on its own without much interaction with the hardware manufacturers. (Which are very complacent about their updating)
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#8While this is a cool project, I can't really see it making financial sense... > Lets throw away the last 20 years development on the linux kernel by thousands of people, and rewrite our own. > How much will it cost? > Ooh - I dunno - If you lend me 1000 engineers, we should be done in about 10 years, cos we're really smart and don't need to implement legacy SCSI support...
> > Ooh - I dunno - If you lend me 1000 engineers, we should be done in about 10 years, cos we're really smart and don't need to implement legacy SCSI support...
Correct, they don't:
> From piecing together information from the online documentation and source code, we can surmise that Fuchsia is a complete operating system for PCs, tablets, and high-end phones.
Their baseline isn't hardware from 40 years ago, it's that of today and only a subset of it. That means that you can forego an enormous amount of things which are all potential sources of problems. The world has evolved a lot, new theories around OS design and security have come and gone.
Just because Linux serves us well doesn't mean we shouldn't explore other options, or that those other options need to support every old data exchange format and hardware port.
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#9What makes Fuchsia different then so many other attempts at writing a new OS? They aren't writing a new OS, at least, not in the complete sense. They are using the IPC system developed in and extracted from Chrome. They are drawing everything in userspace with fast graphics render but the logic for all system components written in Dart from the Flutter project. They use musl for the libc. They are using the little ke…
I wonder if they intend to keep Flutter as the primary UI toolkit, or if that was just used out of convenience. If this really ends up being an Android & Chrome OS replacement, and a large portion of code being written for it also ran natively on iOS, that'd be fantastic. Maybe even cool enough to get me to use Dart ;)
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#10Are there enough clues to figure out if this is intended to eventually displace Android, ChromeOS, the Ubuntu distribution most googlers use on their company machines, or the Linux they run their data centers?
As far as I know, Google hasn't telegraphed the purpose of it. I can't tell if it's targeted at all, none, or some of the above.