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Fuchsia: a new operating system

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Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#241

Post by IshKebab »

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #124
sethladd wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(disclaimer: I work on the Flutter team.) You can use Flutter today to write an app that runs on iOS and Android. :)

How is it in turns of speed? On one hand, the website says that it's compiled to native code (so it can be same speed/faster than Java), but on the other hand, it's based on a soft-type language, which makes optimization difficult (even with V8, JS is still slower than native code). Side question: I understand that Dart was soft-typed because it was supposed to replace/compile to JS, but what advantage does soft-type…

I tried out their demo apps on Android and they were pretty fast but there were still some hiccups. It's definitely not as fast as good Java apps but it is pretty close. Also the animations are on the level of iOS apps - far superior to Java Android apps.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#242

Post by the_why_of_y »

zzzcpan wrote: post #157
X86BSD wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FreeBSD got Capsicum only in 10.x and many projects started using them.

One interesting thing built on top of that is CloudABI:

https://nuxi.nl/ https://www.bsdcan.org/2015/schedule/attachments/330_2015-06...

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#243

Post by the_why_of_y »

pjmlp wrote: post #224
adrianratnapala wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will go down the Windows model of having a stable kernel ABI (I assume). And suffer/enjoy the same trade-offs as Microsoft. That model is not perfect, but it worked for MS -- and Google is in a similar enough position.

Not only Windows, the majority of operating systems are like that, even the old time commercial UNIXEs, only GNU/Linux forces an unstable driver ABI on developers.

Linux and *BSD.

FreeBSD will break ABI every major version, roughly every 2 years.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/VendorInformation

OpenBSD even goes so far as to break the user-space libc ABI in minor releases:

http://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon_2013_time_t/

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#244

Post by gribbly »

galacticpony wrote: post #239
petre wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why the BSDs haven't caught on for embedded appliances and phones while Linux did with a more restrictive and less business friendly license. Sure some companies like iXSystems and Juniper adopted BSDs, but the vast majority used Linux.

The manpower behind Linux is superior. Not sure if it's the "vast majority", but for many business cases following the GPL(v2) rules simply is not a problem. Both the PS4 and the Nintendo Switch run on FreeBSD, by the way.

>Both the PS4 and the Nintendo Switch run on FreeBSD, by the way.

Not exactly from what I've read, the PS4 runs 'Orbis OS' which is based upon FreeBSD 9, meanwhile the Nintendo Switch is using the network stack from FreeBSD, but also stuff from Android and the custom OS they wrote for 3DS.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#245

Post by ptx »

naasking wrote: post #121
Klathmon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually really beautifully simple. Thanks for this explanation, it really helped the idea "click"

And for another beautiful convergence: nowadays most software development is done in languages that naturally express capability patterns, namely memory-safe languages. That is, if you have a reference to an object or value, you have the authority to invoke any of the methods on that object or call any functions that accept such a value. So object references are capabilities. Most such languages only go too far by al…

> To make a memory safe language capability secure, you simply remove all sources of ambient authority.

Isn't this more or less what Sun tried to do with Java applets, which in practice turned out not to be so simple while providing a rich API?

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#246

Post by [deleted] »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #185

Lots of interest in Microkernels since everyone got tired of kernel vulnerabilities. So who won the Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate? It is too soon to say (Zhou Enlai said that of the French revolution - almost 200 years after the fact) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb... The article says that the focus is on 'PCs, tablets, and high-end phones'. Wouldn't a more secure OS be relevant to server en…

[deleted]

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#247

Post by dEnigma »

wmf wrote: post #209
stouset wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but that's my point. You're playing a game and the display crashes — I guess it's nice in theory that the rest of your system stayed up, but you're still more than likely just going to reboot, no? If not, how exactly do you plan to restart the graphics process?

Windows automatically restarts the GPU driver after a crash; the screen goes black for a few seconds and then all the windows come back up. It can also upgrade the GPU driver without a reboot. It's not used often but it's pretty handy.

This impressed me a lot a couple of months ago, when my GPU driver started crashing about every 5 seconds while playing a game, and Windows kept restarting it, without even killing the game. The performance was abysmal of course, but still pretty neat.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#248

Post by rwmj »

Torgo wrote: post #195
stouset wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this actually happen with enough regularity to care? In the cases where it does, I imagine it's a situation where you're actually doing 3D-accelerated renders of the user interface. In which case, when the graphics subsystem craps out, hasn't your running system been rendered effectively unusable anyway? I get that this is a nice idea in theory, but does it actually improve anything practical in practice?

Yes? I haven't played games in a while, but when I did, crashes were frequent enough to be annoying, and ~100% of the time it was video drivers.

The Linux i915 driver manages to hard freeze my laptop every few days without any 3D games or even a compositing window manager ... It would be lovely to take it out of the kernel and isolate it with IOMMU.

Re: Fuchsia: a new operating system

#250

Post by gkya »

throwayedidqo wrote: post #220

Fuchsia sounds awesome. Allowing user space processes to do more of their own work frees up the kernel from providing standardized interfaces to hardware. This makes it significantly easier to build a closed platform with unbreakable barriers between processes, and this is a great thing in terms of security and fine grained access controls for each process. Individual process isolation is extremely important for most…

This is a complete misunderstanding/misrepresentation of what a microkernel is. Even GNU is developing their own microkernel, the HURD.
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