Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fuchsia: a new operating system

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 324 posts

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#91

Post by bitmapbrother »

jrs95 wrote: post #9
kardianos wrote: post #5

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 wonder if they intend to keep Flutter as the primary UI toolkit, or if that was just used out of convenience. If this really ends up being an Android & Chrome OS replacement, and a large portion of code being written for it also ran natively on iOS, that'd be fantastic. Maybe even cool enough to get me to use Dart ;)

Is there a reason not to use Flutter? From what I've seen of Flutter it seems like a very competent cross platform UI toolkit. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they announced that you can start using Dart/Flutter to write cross platform Android/iOS apps at I/O 2017.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#92

Post by dleslie »

Touche wrote: post #61
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…

> 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…

For a while I had a Linux machine running just to use bitchX; in '96 IIRC. :D

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#93

Post by nickpsecurity »

deno wrote: post #84
MBCook wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The security of Chrome was inspired by OP Web Browser and SFI schemes. Clever but actuslly weaker than predecessors to boost speed.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#94

Post by michaelmrose »

mankash666 wrote: post #49
desdiv wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

No. GPUs typically work over the PCIE bus, and one can talk to PCIE via user space as well. In legacy systems like Linux the mapping of virtual to physical address and generation of scatter-gather-lists (SGLs) resided in the kernel. If one moves the same functionality to the user space without loss in performance (which is what magenta seems to do), there's no benefit to kernel GPU drivers. Then there's the whole "GP…

You make open source drivers sound like a bad thing.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#95

Post by jrs95 »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #91
jrs95 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if they intend to keep Flutter as the primary UI toolkit, or if that was just used out of convenience. If this really ends up being an Android & Chrome OS replacement, and a large portion of code being written for it also ran natively on iOS, that'd be fantastic. Maybe even cool enough to get me to use Dart ;)

Is there a reason not to use Flutter? From what I've seen of Flutter it seems like a very competent cross platform UI toolkit. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they announced that you can start using Dart/Flutter to write cross platform Android/iOS apps at I/O 2017.

Not that I'm aware of, although the site still says it's a technical preview.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#96

Post by sethladd »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #91
jrs95 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if they intend to keep Flutter as the primary UI toolkit, or if that was just used out of convenience. If this really ends up being an Android & Chrome OS replacement, and a large portion of code being written for it also ran natively on iOS, that'd be fantastic. Maybe even cool enough to get me to use Dart ;)

Is there a reason not to use Flutter? From what I've seen of Flutter it seems like a very competent cross platform UI toolkit. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they announced that you can start using Dart/Flutter to write cross platform Android/iOS apps at I/O 2017.

(disclaimer: I work on the Flutter team.)

You can use Flutter today to write an app that runs on iOS and Android. :)

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#97

Post by bitmapbrother »

jnwatson wrote: post #57

If I had to guess, this looks to be a strong candidate for the embedded OS market. There are still lots of folks running VxWorks, QNX, ThreadX, Mentor Graphics' Nucleus, Green Hills' Integrity. In fact, it looks a lot like the same general design as Integrity, a microkernel capability-based architecture with as much as possible in user space.

Its modern rendering pipeline would suggest it has uses for far more than the embedded OS market.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#98

Post by ge96 »

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.

Yeah I used to use Atom. I know Vim is what I should use for "lean" but it's not easy to use. I did see some pretty themes 'space wrap' or something like that.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#99

Post by bitmapbrother »

ehsankia wrote: post #33
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.

And let's not forget this fantastic article about Android from back in 2007. https://www.engadget.com/2007/11/05/symbian-nokia-microsoft-...

Thanks for that link. These quotes are golden:

Palm's not the only company that isn't afraid to speak out on the Open Handset Alliance. Nokia, Microsoft and Symbian made it most clear today that they don't perceive danger from the new initiative and corresponding Android OS, with Nokia stating it quite bluntly: "We don't see this as a threat." Microsoft was a bit more on the defensive. "It really sounds that they are getting a whole bunch of people together to build a phone and that's something we've been doing for five years," said Scott Horn, from Microsoft's Windows Mobile marketing team. "I don't understand the impact that they are going to have."

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#100

Post by ryukafalz »

Touche wrote: 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?

In this case the source isn't just being thrown over the wall, though. It's being developed out in the open, just without any indication of what it's for.
Post reply on HN