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How sandboxing works in Fuchsia

fuchsia.googlesource.com

91–100 of 172 posts

Re: How sandboxing works in Fuchsia

#91
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe my phone runs a 64bit ARM with eight 2.3ghz cores and has the same amount of ram as the base Acer model?

The i5 has 2 cores, different memory bus setup, cache setup, etc. If you're saying it has the same rough level of horsepower, that makes sense. Not at all the same architecture though.

> similar to what a current flagship phone has in terms of resources if not exact architecture.

:)

Re: How sandboxing works in Fuchsia

#93
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sends a positive signal to a group of people who really don't matter - the very small minority of users who like open source and aren't already placated by AOSP existing - but a negative one to people who do - their vendors. Fuschia is designed so that driver sources don't need to be available, and we can still upgrade the kernel. This is better than doing exactly the same thing as before which didn't work . It so…

Let me restate that: "GPLing Fuschia sends a negative signal to vendors that don't want to release the source for their drivers." That is fine. Any hardware that is released should come with full source code for its drivers. Vendors that are unwilling to comply, should not be releasing hardware. Since it would be infeasible and restrictive to legally enforce, we can just forbid them to use our popular open source ker…

>Here is a thought: Maybe if Google started (threatening to) enforce the GPL against vendors, this would be fixed. Sure, it would also destroy their business relationships. But it would actually fix this security problem, today, immediately.

This is naive and you know it. In reality, what would happen is 3-4 years from now, once the lawsuit has run its course, maybe vendors would need to publicize their binary sources, but given that much time they might just develop in house solutions.

Re: How sandboxing works in Fuchsia

#94
post #8
post #2

So I'm not clear what the puropse of fuchsia is. I understand it's an os which may replace android or chomeos but why the move away from linux based systems? Both are open source platforms.

>open source platforms Part of the motivation is certainly to get away from the GPL requirements of using Linux, so that Google and its partners can release products to users that have proprietary modifications to the kernel, without giving those same users access to the source code of the kernel. That would of course be a disaster for user autonomy and freedom, but why should Google care about that... Edit: This isn…

GPL implicit patent grab, Google thus prefers more open licenses than GPL.

Re: How sandboxing works in Fuchsia

#95
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why is it not licensed under the GPL, like Linux?

The real answer is because the people involved believe the licenses they are using are even more free. IE they do not subscribe to the FSF's ideology. It's their software, so they get to choose. It's like arguing NetBSD should use the GPL license. As for why it generally doesn't make sense to use the GPL for this: Even the FSF doesn't think GPLv2 is the right license for linux? GPL'ing linux hasn't prevented any of t…

> GPL'ing linux hasn't prevented any of the problems you mention, either in theory or in practice, so why do the same thing and hope for a different result?

It hasn't eliminated the problem, but it has worked in some cases to the benfit of the vendors and customers.

For example the open source Wifi router community sprung up from one such effort :

http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/3562391

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DD-WRT

Re: How sandboxing works in Fuchsia

#96
post #2

So I'm not clear what the puropse of fuchsia is. I understand it's an os which may replace android or chomeos but why the move away from linux based systems? Both are open source platforms.

Linux is a disaster security-wise (look at how massive things like grsecurity are) and that won't change anytime soon. Android has inherited all of that and it's by far the shittiest mobile OS out there in terms of how easy it is to own. It makes sense that Google would like to move away from Linux given how important mobile security is and will become in the future. They certainly have the resources to get it right,…

>Android has inherited all of that and it's by far the shittiest mobile OS out there in terms of how easy it is to own.

Then why don't you try? Google has $200,000 USD waiting for you to exploit a fully patched Pixel. Or are you too rich to make it worth your while? If you're going to say something that silly at least have the technical prowess to walk the talk.

Re: How sandboxing works in Fuchsia

#97
My take is that Fuchsia is Google's attempt to unify their mobile ecosystem under one proprietary OS like Apple does with iOS (yes, yes I hear you, "But Darwin is OSS..." try making that into iOS though...): which is a good move for Google.

Re: How sandboxing works in Fuchsia

#98
post #2

So I'm not clear what the puropse of fuchsia is. I understand it's an os which may replace android or chomeos but why the move away from linux based systems? Both are open source platforms.

The other explanation is that it would be easier to maintain - right now Android kernel is not the same as mainline kernel and has a few rather large functional patches (things like Binder, some modified permissions, wakelock system, support for BIG.little) which are really tough to port ahead. This is why most of devices are still running rather old kernels - e.g. even Pixel is on 3.18.

Patches for these largest features weren't accepted into mailine - they're not really fully fit for a general-purpose kernel and Google's and Linux kernel teams differ in opinions if they're even required and how they should be implemented. As such, it probably makes sense for Google to use their own, fully internally developed, kernel which is built from ground up to handle IPC, security and mobile chips in the way Android/ChromeOS expect it to.

Re: How sandboxing works in Fuchsia

#99

My take is that Fuchsia is Google's attempt to unify their mobile ecosystem under one proprietary OS like Apple does with iOS (yes, yes I hear you, "But Darwin is OSS..." try making that into iOS though...): which is a good move for Google.

> under one proprietary OS

fuchsia and all it's components are licensed under BSD 3 clause, MIT, Apache 2.0

Re: How sandboxing works in Fuchsia

#100
"dev, gn, /svc, /pkg, PA_VMAR_ROOT" Hate this old unix approach for name shortening, what makes them unreadable and non intuitive. If they break compatibility anyway, they could name things in a way, that people can read like a book.
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