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Fuchsia: a new operating system

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Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#21

Post by maxerickson »

sdegutis wrote: post #18
bitmapbrother wrote: post #11

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.

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?

It's likely to be lighter than ChromeOS.

ChromeOS was a locked down userspace on top of Linux. Fuchsia gets rid of the Linux.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#22

Post by SCHiM »

That whole handle idea of the 'capability' system, but especially its implementation with 'handles', sounds exactly like Win32 to me. I haven't looked at the source, can anyone confirm or explain what exactly is different?

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#23

Post by Arizhel »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #6
londons_explore wrote: post #2

While 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.…

>On top of that, Linux essentially sucked all the air out of the UNIX development space by killing off all the commercial UNIXes.

For good reason too. The commercial UNIXes were absurdly expensive, and they were all incompatible with each other too. There's a reason all the software developers abandoned UNIX and went to Windows. UNIX killed itself with ridiculous license fees and fragmentation. Linux saved it by making it free, open-source, and unifying it and using common standards instead of a bunch of vendors trying to make their own hoping to gain marketshare and ending up losing everything to MS. Of course, this hasn't prevented Linux from having its own share of fragmentation (the different DEs chiefly), but it's nothing like the UNIX Wars of the 80s.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#25

Post by Arizhel »

ungzd wrote: post #14
ysleepy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's because all the stupid vendors refuse to share anything, and won't publish their sources for the various device drivers needed. So every time there's some new flash chip or whatever, there's a custom closed-source device driver for it which doesn't get mainlined or updated for newer kernel revisions, and devices with that chip are forever stuck on an ancient kernel version.

There's only two ways around this: 1) somehow force companies to open-source their driver code, or 2) have a static, unchanging (or at least very backwards-compatible) ABI for device drivers, and then just suffer with shoddy drivers written by vendors which cause all kinds of glitchy behavior, as Windows was infamous for for so many years.

This doesn't happen with the mainline tree because it's all open-source and gets debugged and inspected by others, but that just doesn't happen with the cellphones/Android.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#26

Post by E6300 »

jcoffland wrote: post #12
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More like because they've done a good-enough job and because most distributions are free of charge.

(Don't get your knickers in a knot. I'm not banging on Linux.)

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#27

Post by mtgx »

VonGuard wrote: post #19

Capability-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…

Looks like it's written in C++. Regardless of how "clean" the code is right now, it's only a matter of time because it becomes roughly as bad as any other OS written in C++ in terms of vulnerabilities found in it per million lines of code.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#28

Post by binarycrusader »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #6
londons_explore wrote: post #2

While 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.…

"Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad."

That's not an opinion necessarily shared by others who worked on UNIX and still do in some cases.

Certainly, there are commercial UNIX releases today that have relatively recent innovations and capabilities that still aren't available in other operating systems.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#29

Post by reggieband »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #6
londons_explore wrote: post #2

While 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.…

> 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.

I think that is a stretch. Apple has significant investment in Darwin and are a huge contributor to LLVM. Also, don't count out Amazon ... they have their fingers in so many pies these days ...

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#30

Post by ori_b »

maxerickson wrote: post #21
sdegutis wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's likely to be lighter than ChromeOS. ChromeOS was a locked down userspace on top of Linux. Fuchsia gets rid of the Linux.

Linux may be hacky, but it isn't exactly heavy.
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