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Fuchsia: a new operating system

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Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#31
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

Actually the free of charge aspect limited uptake of Linux in the commercial sector for a long time. It has it's faults but Linux won by being a great software.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#32
post #25
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

> It's because all the stupid vendors refuse to share anything

I'm not going to defend the vendors (much). But it's not free to upstream your code. It's work. And I'd argue that it's an investment that will pay off, but you can't fault others much for seeing it differently.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#33

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.

And let's not forget this fantastic article about Android from back in 2007.

https://www.engadget.com/2007/11/05/symbian-nokia-microsoft-...

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#34

What 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 think this definitely qualifies as a new OS. It's true that not everything is completely reimagined compared to what has come before. So what? Great artists steal.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#35
post #22

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?

Roughly put: in a capability based system, if you have a valid handle for a service, then you can use that service. But the only way you can get a valid handle is to ask your parent process for one --- handles are unforgeable. So your parent gets to check that you're legitimate.

...but your parent, in turn, has limited permissions, because the only way it can get a handle is to ask its parent. And when you ask your parent for a filesystem handle, your parent doesn't have to give you the handle it has. Your parent might give you a limited filesystem handle which only allows writes to /tmp.

...and when you, in turn, start a subprocess --- say, an instance of sqlite for use as a database --- you have to give it handles for the things it wants to do on your behalf. But your filesystem handle only allows writes to /tmp. That means that your sqlite instance can only write to /tmp too.

There's more to it than that, because in real life you also want to forward capabilities to other running services as part of RPCs, but you tend to end up with a natural container system with multiple redundant layers of isolation, all running at minimum necessary privilege, and all hardware-mediated.

Another really interesting capability-based OS is Genode:

https://genode.org/about/screenshots

https://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/index

It'll allow you to run complete OS kernels as capability-restricted Genode processes, effectively allowing virtual machines as first-class citizens.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#36

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.…

> 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 ...

Amazon is way too business and money oriented to make such a long term and risky investment.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#37

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.

Chrome was based on WebKit, and they bought Android (already based on Linux). Neither one was made from scratch.

Google certainly has the resources to do something like this. But neither of those projects (others mentioned Android) were started from scratch at Google.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#38
post #25
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

> won't publish their sources for the various device drivers needed.

And how is Fuchsia supposed to help that?

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#39

What 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…

>They are drawing everything in userspace with fast graphics render...

Dumb question, does this mean that it's limited to software rendering only? You need to go through the kernel to talk to the GPU, right?

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#40
post #7

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...

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…

That would be awesome. Like AOSP for everyone
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