People that question the existence of Fuchsia need only remember why Chrome was created. A lot of people thought Google was wasting their time by building a browser, including Eric Schmidt, and look how that turned out. Now, I'm not saying that Fuchsia will have the same success as Chrome, but it's clear that they think that having an OS that they can control the direction of is important to them.
Fuchsia: a new operating system
11–20 of 324 posts
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#12While 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.…
> Linux essentially sucked all the air out of the UNIX development space by killing off all the commercial UNIXes.
Only because they have done a really good job.
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#13While 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...
A few days ago somebody posted a link to some very old UNIX documentation from the early 70s. Something that struck me was how similar it was to modern UNIX systems. A lot of abstractions underpinning Linux, the BSDs, and OSX have not changed much in the 45 years since UNIX V1 was developed. It wouldn't hurt to take a fresh look at things.
Your argument could have been used against almost every project Google's worked on. Email, search, Go, phones, Chrome, maps, etc. all had established proprietary and open source competitors.
It might be expensive, but it's cheaper, more practical, and more likely to succeed than something like self-driving cars or Google Glass.
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#14While 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 w…
Why Linux kernel can support lots of CPU architectures in mainline tree but somehow requires to make a fork for each handset made by all these home appliance manufacturers? If you let all these vacuum cleaner companies to fork Fuschia, they'll fork it and put their "unique features" right into microkernel.
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#15The memory mapping model is really interesting, since it moves a lot of that out of the kernel and into user-space, but it seems like it has more disadvantages than advantages. What am I missing?
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#16While 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.…
[deleted]
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#17People that question the existence of Fuchsia need only remember why Chrome was created. A lot of people thought Google was wasting their time by building a browser, including Eric Schmidt, and look how that turned out. Now, I'm not saying that Fuchsia will have the same success as Chrome, but it's clear that they think that having an OS that they can control the direction of is important to them.
It's also interesting that there's a lot of long-term web guys, almost all of them ex-Chrome (and some who were working on Firefox at Google before Chrome was a thing), many of them pretty senior at the point they left Chrome.
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#18People that question the existence of Fuchsia need only remember why Chrome was created. A lot of people thought Google was wasting their time by building a browser, including Eric Schmidt, and look how that turned out. Now, I'm not saying that Fuchsia will have the same success as Chrome, but it's clear that they think that having an OS that they can control the direction of is important to them.
Then what about ChromeOS? Do you think they're trying to build a "full-fledged" OS for the modern era, with safety and security in mind, but not as lightweight as ChromeOS?
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#19Capability-based operating systems must be the future. If they are not, then we are all doomed to continue to exist in a messy world where security problems crop up every minute. Capability-based access controls are one of the best options for getting out of our current mess, but they're also the type of thing that must be implemented very low in the system in order to work.
Hopefully, when we start ripping out *nix before 2038, Fuscia and other capability-based OS's can take over.
Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system
#20Capability-based operating systems must be the future. If they are not, then we are all doomed to continue to exist in a messy world where security problems crop up every minute. Capability-based access controls are one of the best options for getting out of our current mess, but they're also the type of thing that must be implemented very low in the system in order to work. Hopefully, when we start ripping out *nix…
And they've been such since the 70s:
http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/
(This book is well worth reading...)