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Fuchsia: a new operating system

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Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#71

I don't want or need any new OS or product from this company. Everything they touch, initially looks super exciting and positive, until they grab you by the balls once the competition is out.

Specific examples might help to evaluate this generic claim.

(I work for open-source projects at Google, and don't see your claim being universally or even mostly true)

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#72
> The default Fuchsia filesystem, called minfs, was also built from scratch. The device manager creates a root filesystem in-memory, providing a virtual filesystem (VFS) layer that other filesystems are mounted under. However, since the filesystems run as user-space servers, accessing them is done via a protocol to those servers. Every instance of a mounted filesystem has a server running behind the scenes, taking care of all data access to it. The user-space C libraries make the protocol transparent to user programs, which will just make calls to open, close, read, and write files.

Plan 9 is not dead, it ideas live on in other projects.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#73
post #71

I don't want or need any new OS or product from this company. Everything they touch, initially looks super exciting and positive, until they grab you by the balls once the competition is out.

Specific examples might help to evaluate this generic claim. (I work for open-source projects at Google, and don't see your claim being universally or even mostly true)

How many antitrust cases there are pointed at Google in EU alone? It's a one thing to work for open-source projects, another is to orchestrate the entire charrade that's about to be unleashed onto the users.

Everything at Google, from it's original product (search engine) to embedded devices, medical research, entire Alphabet portfolio is aimed at total dominance of every area in people's lifes. It's an evil company in my eyes, it's been a long time since I retained at least some trust in this company and it's vision.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#74

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?

I think this is a symptom of internal rivalries at Google. Seems like a combination of Dart (arch-rival to Go) and ChromeOS (arch-rival to Android).

That's not necessarily a bad thing -- Google's M.O. has always been to try lots of different things at once. But it may mean they literally don't have a solid long-term plan for it yet.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#75
post #59
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious on advantages besides being secure. I normally have garbage computers so I like to run lean on stuff. Not to the point of using Arch but Ubuntu with i3. Also will "regular" programs still run. Like as a developer I need VS Code, Filezilla, file manager, Kate, LAMP stack installed. Are there concerns on non-dedicated graphics cards, or running say an ARM-based processor. Also I'm not sure what you mean by '...…

Not often someone says lean and VS Code in the same statement.

It’s not very fast, but it’s surprisingly easy on the resources, especially memory.

Compare using VS Code w/ Typescript Language Service to any type of dev stack that includes the word “Scala.”

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#76
post #63

> This is a new take on open-source development where it is out in the open, yet secret. Hasn't this always been the way Android operates? Developed in secret, source thrown over the wall every release?

I think this is more, that things are being developed without an explanation of its purpose. There's no "here are the new features in Android O" blog post

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#77
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 also because ARM doesn't have a stable, standard BIOS the way x86 does. ARM is otherwise great, which is why people use it, but it has that one big downside. Every phone has a different hardware configuration, and getting that hardware working is always a fiddly bespoke job.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#78

I don't understand what the value is in writing a new original microkernel from scratch in this day and age when sel4* is free and open source, performance tuned for 20ish years, is security hardened, and is provably correct for both security and features? This doesn't seem like a wise path to take. * See http://sel4.systems/

You are asking why NIH is a problem for a project that seems to be at least partly driven by NIH?

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#79
post #61

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…

> If they are not, then we are all doomed to continue to exist in a messy world where security problems crop up every minute. Side-tangent, but security enthusiasts need to calm down on the "world is ending" talk. Those of us who lived through Windows ME, where logging on IRC basically gave you a 25% chance of having your computer hijacked by some random script kiddie, think it's laughable to say that security is any…

But it still feels like it. Security news should be “someone managed to breach one of the 20 layers that protect you,” not “someone got root, again.”

At the very least you should be able to stay secure if you know what you are doing. But even that’s not enough. You also need to be lucky && uninteresting && not actually using computers.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#80
post #68

The 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?

Big advantage is better security.

And it can be a lot faster. Jumping in and out of the kernel is slow, shared memory is relatively fast.
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