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Fuchsia: a new operating system

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Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#81

Post by zzzcpan »

linschn wrote: post #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 ca…

You are confusing things that derive naturally from a microkernel architecture with Plan 9.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#82

Post by aanm1988 »

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...

They get to control everything with this and answer to no one. They can learn from past mistakes. They aren't bound to linux legacy support.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#84

Post by deno »

MBCook wrote: post #37
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.

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.

They’ve build Webkit sandbox from scratch AFAIK. That’s not exactly rebranding.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#85

Post by aanm1988 »

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.…

Apple?

Amazon does release a modified Android. They could probably spend the money and get there.

Doesn't oracle do a fair bit of linux work?

Red hat as well. Building a new OS they do have the knowledge at least.

IBM?

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#86

Post by aanm1988 »

spdionis wrote: post #36
reggieband wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's a pretty ridiculous statement. Amazon won't dump money into BS just because, but they are absolutely willing to take big risks if the payoff is there.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#87

Post by deno »

coldtea wrote: post #48
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...

> Lets throw away the last 20 years development on the linux kernel by thousands of people, and rewrite our own. Chrome has more code than the Linux kernel. The numbers I see for 2012 (way back) are: "4,490,488 lines of code, 5,448,668 lines with comments included, spread over 21,367 unique files." Linux, on the other hand, was ~ 200K lines of code for the kernel (the rest is 7 million for drivers, about which the ne…

But how does it compare to Emacs? :)

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#88

Post by dleslie »

jjuel wrote: post #59
ge96 wrote: 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 no joe, but it sure as hell beats NetBeans.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#89

Post by Someone »

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.

Linux wasn't really good before it became popular.

I think it won because it offered neutral grounds (a place where lots of players who don't have huge market power can meet without fear of being swindled) and, partly, out of luck (you could call it 'good timing', but I don't think Linus considered that)

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#90

Post by CalChris »

I've been waiting for this to be released. I suppose everyone has been.

Capabilities. Like fine grain locks, these are very powerful and very hard to get right. That's the lesson from Hydra, the 432, .... No, it's not a hard mechanism for the microkernel to get right; it's a hard policy for the application programmer to get right. However, that's probably more of an opportunity rather than meant as a criticism. Our tools are massively more evolved than they were in the 70s. It'll be interesting to see what happens with capabilities.

C++. Oh lord. Why are you writing a microkernel in C++? If there was anything they learned from L4 (Xen, Linux, ...) it is that C is sufficient. Why do you want to implement something small with something that is large? This one is a real head scratcher.

Provably secure. They did this with the SEL4 microkernel so this is a doable thing. If they're going to hang their hat on security (capabilities, microkernel, ...) there's no excuse for not having done this already and delivered a provably secure microkernel out of the box.

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