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Fuchsia: a new operating system

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Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#101

Post by dvdwasibi »

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.

There are two talks at I/O 2017 for Flutter.

https://events.google.com/io/schedule/?sid=fed907cf-4b51-433...

https://events.google.com/io/schedule/?sid=496d01fb-2139-4fd...

Disclaimer: I'm in one of the talks.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#102

Post by bitmapbrother »

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.

And Fuchsia is using code from Chrome, Android and other open source projects. Not much these days is really made from scratch. iOS wasn't nor was MacOS or even MS-DOS for that matter.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#103

Post by bitmapbrother »

swiley wrote: post #56
maxerickson wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 was the only remotely useful, sane, and lightweight part of ChromeOS.

It was also the primary vector for security vulnerabilities.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#104

Post by bitmapbrother »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #70

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/

The micro-kernel used by Fuchsia is not built from scratch. It's based on a heavily modified version of the LK kernel.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#105

Post by cbsmith »

michaelmrose wrote: post #94
mankash666 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, but pushing that agenda via architectural level changes is not exactly a way to get a good architecture.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#106

Post by bitmapbrother »

ealexhudson wrote: post #65
wyldfire wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How much will it cost? Good thing it's funded by someone who has lots and lots of money! > Lets throw away the last 20 years development on the linux kernel by thousands of people, and rewrite our own. To suggest that linux is as good as it gets is a mistake. Operating systems are challenging to write, but certainly not impossible. If you're Google, you see big security risks involved in Linux's design. Google trie…

Linux isn't as good as it gets, but it moves significantly faster than pretty much any other software project. The majority of the code is hardware driver/support, and it's relatively well understood in terms of performance now. Linux today is not much like Linux 10 years ago. Making something better than Linux in some way isn't hard. Making something consistently and sustainably better in enough ways, at the rate Li…

I don't believe the intention of Fuchsia is to take on Linux and become the jack of all trades OS but rather the master of some trades.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#107

Post by protomyth »

puzzle wrote: post #66
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…

The future? The System/38 (aka AS/400 aka iSeries aka System i) had capabilities from the beginning, almost 40 years ago.

I sometimes wonder if addition to a Ethics class, Computer Science students need to take a Computer Archaeology class. It might not be a bad thing to bring up a lot of the concepts that aren't in the main stream anymore that have been tried.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#108

Post by sedachv »

cwyers wrote: post #62
jcoffland wrote: post #12

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.

Eh. The biggest thing Linux had going for it in terms of winning market share was running on commodity x86 parts in a time period when the commercial Unices weren't touching it, and x86 made really strong gains in beating everybody else at performance per dollar.

> The biggest thing Linux had going for it in terms of winning market share was running on commodity x86 parts in a time period when the commercial Unices weren't touching it

From the 1980s to 1993 there were:

    v7 ports: Microsoft Xenix (later became SCO), Venix, Coherent
    System III ports: PC/IX (later 386/ix)  
    SVR3 ports: official Intel, ESIX from Everex
    SVR4 ports: Dell UNIX, Novell UnixWare, Microport

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#109

Post by spdionis »

aanm1988 wrote: post #86
spdionis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Both big risk and long term? I don't think so. They're not a company with much philosophical vision. They provide good, useful, services to make money. That's not enough to start a successful operating system.

I don't mean to bash Amazon. They do well what they do, at the scale they have. I only think the project would not fit the company as it is now.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#110

Post by makomk »

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…

Having control over the virtual to physical address mapping and scatter-gather lists for GPUs is effectively equivalent to kernel-level access anyway, though, because it lets you carry out DMA to and from arbitrary physical memory addresses. Some proprietary drivers for mobile GPUs have even given this level of access to untrusted user processes in the past leading to privilege escalation to root.
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