Fuchsia: a new operating system

Post by milesrout » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 10:13 PM UTC

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.…

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 10:14 PM UTC

Arizhel wrote: post #23

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.…

>On top of that, Linux essentially sucked all the air out of the UNIX development space by killing off all the commercial UNIXes. For good reason too. The commercial UNIXes were absurdly expensive, and they were all incompatible with each other too. There's a reason all the software developers abandoned UNIX and went to Windows. UNIX killed itself with ridiculous license fees and fragmentation. Linux saved it by maki…

Post by staticassertion » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 10:19 PM UTC

CalChris wrote: post #143

pikzen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Because if there was anything proven from years and years of using C, it's that it is woefully insecure and should not be trusted to write a kernel with. You can st…

Yes, we know that C is not secure. We also know that C++ is not secure and moreover it definitely isn't C, now with security . It's just more bigger C. So use your phrase, you can still fuck up with C++ . You can just do it in more clever and insidious ways. seL4, a third-generation microkernel is 8,700 lines of C code and 600 lines of assembler. http://web1.cs.columbia.edu/~junfeng/09fa-e6998/papers/sel4.... So we a…

Post by zzzcpan » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 10:24 PM UTC

X86BSD wrote: post #144

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…

Capabilities? FreeBSD, and other Unix flavors have had caps for decades. No one uses them. Security is useless if no one uses it. Capabilities are too hard, too complex, to manage. Great idea. Horrible implementation.

Post by skissane » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 10:35 PM UTC

sedachv wrote: post #108

cwyers wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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