111–120 of 235 posts
Please don't editorialize titles. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . Lots of explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (Submitted title was 'Fuchsia overview – “Fuchsia is not a science experiment”')
Given Google's penchant for abruptly canceling platforms, I hope that implementors and vendors will be careful with this.
I'd be surprised if any vendor adopts Fuchsia thinking it has anything better than a 10-20% chance of being mainstream.
Today we have Android and iOS as the dominant Mobile phone OSs. Don't forget about all the attempts to dethrone those two by: Symbian, WebOS, Windows phone, Blackberry, Tizen, Ubuntu Touch, kaios, firefox os, PureOS, LiteOS,...etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Isolation" of driver code that can talk to on-SoC hardware is just not very meaningful. You can only have real driver isolation if it's enforced on the hardware side via some IOMMU mechanism (or by keeping the hardware isolated on the USB bus, etc.), otherwise you're just adding pointless overhead for no real benefit.
I didn't get it. Don't we want, for example, wifi driver not to be able to access and corrupt (due to some bug) GPU driver's memory?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a strong feeling that Fuchsia will not be abandoned. I can't put my finger on it, but Google's approach and tone around Fuchsia feels really different from how they talked about / marketed Reader, or even Wave, or other things they shut down. I'm an Android developer learning Flutter and Dart out of both curiosity and an gamble that it will likely be a faster-improving way to make cross-platform apps than othe…
I agree Fuchsia should prevail. My reasoning is that, presuming it succeeds technically, it could only be killed politically if both Android and ChromeOS prevented Fuchsia from being used on first party devices. This seems unlikely. Google projects that get killed are either retail products that gain insufficient traction (for Google) or expensive projects that stall for technical or logistical reasons.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> An open source driver Lost you already. Since Fuchsia uses a pushover license instead of a copyleft license, the vendors' drivers aren't going to be open source. Look how many companies today don't open-source their Linux drivers, and they're breaking the law by not doing so. It's going to be so much worse when there's "nothing" wrong with keeping them proprietary.
However hard it is to produce an open source driver, that's how hard it is. Sometimes the hardware vendors do it. Sometimes dedicated developers produce an open source, clean room driver. So, when an open source driver exists, Fuschia will make it useful for a long time.
Further its entirely possible for a device to require signed drivers and their is even a security incentive to doing so. They don't have to ever let you have your own drivers for their hardware.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For various reasons, but nothing fundamental. "Hardware vendors being unwilling to make the drivers they write open source" is a pretty fundamental reason. Which is worse, a phone where you can't update kernel because of the closed drivers or a phone where you can update the kernel, with closed drivers? I don't think that realistically there's a third option. The open source community is not, for example, going to…
> The open source community is not, for example, going to make their own high performance gpus. I think we should lower the entry threshold first. The open source and free GPU project was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw http://llhd.io/ . After all, one of the main problems with OpenHardware projects is the closed FPGA ecosystem.
Still a long way to go of course, but I'm pretty positive about the direction things are heading.
>Fuchsia aims to provide drivers with a binary-stable interface. In the future, drivers compiled for one version of Fuchsia will continue to work in future versions of Fuchsia without needing to be modified or even recompiled. This approach means that Fuchsia devices will be able to update to newer versions of Fuchsia seamlessly while keeping their existing drivers. This is a massive step back for open source. The fa…
Linux is full of security bugs. It is ludicrous to suggest Linux is high quality. OpenBSD, maybe. Not Linux.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first GPU came out twenty one years ago. Why on Earth do you think all of a sudden we're going to get something we've never gotten before?
The RISC-V community is already working on GPUs, some of them open: https://github.com/felsabbagh3/Vortex https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22492902 https://libre-riscv.org/3d_gpu/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The open source community is not, for example, going to make their own high performance gpus. Of course it will.
The first GPU came out twenty one years ago. Why on Earth do you think all of a sudden we're going to get something we've never gotten before?
>Fuchsia aims to provide drivers with a binary-stable interface. In the future, drivers compiled for one version of Fuchsia will continue to work in future versions of Fuchsia without needing to be modified or even recompiled. This approach means that Fuchsia devices will be able to update to newer versions of Fuchsia seamlessly while keeping their existing drivers. This is a massive step back for open source. The fa…
I really want to agree with you, and in principle, it would be far better for hardware manufacturers to upstream their drivers. In practice this hasn't happened and will never happen, because there's no incentive to support hardware no longer making money (a chip is only sold once, after all). I think the mounting cost of e-waste is a far bigger deal. Think of the unimaginable amount of carbon impact from the million…
I'm skeptical of this. People buy new phones because they are faster, or because they did update and the new version of the OS is very slow on old hardware. People buy new hardware because they want new hardware.
Most non-tech people I know actively avoid updating their phones because it's annoying. They will ignore the notifications and choose older software over the inconvenience of updating and rebooting their phone.