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Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

blog.quarkslab.com

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Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#131

Post by monadic2 »

RivieraKid wrote: post #57

I'm more excited about the possibility of a high quality desktop OS rather than the kernel. The Linux kernel is great but a great open-source desktop OS doesn't exist today. Specifically, this product doesn't exist today: - Desktop environment that matches or surpasses Mac OS in quality, performance and UX design. - It includes seamless synchronization between devices. - Apps are sandboxed, similarly to Android or iO…

> Desktop environment that matches or surpasses Mac OS in quality, performance and UX design.

Is there any evidence google can pull this off or wants to? I’d think they would want you in a browser.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#132

Post by surajrmal »

panpanna wrote: post #117
kyaghmour wrote: post #4

This debate about monolithic vs. micro-kernels has been had many times. Maybe this time the resolution is different, who knows. But FWIW Linux didn't reach its success because someone made a feature comparison between it and what else was out there in a spreadsheet and somehow discovered how Linux was so much better. Instead, Linux won (and continues to win) because it's the Rocky Balboa of operating systems. It may…

I agree with you on the first part: Linux's best weapon is its community and strong leadership. But in my opinion, the second most important feature of Linux is in fact its ability to change large parts of the kernel when and if needed. And do it very very quickly. And this something microkernels cannot do. They are just slower when doing major changes that touch many parts of there OS.

Isn't this more so related to having all relevant code in the same repo rather than about being a monolithic kernel? As long as an OS's out of tree contract with out of tree users is well defined, refactoring code within the repo shouldn't be any more difficult. The fact that Linux's contract is the very obvious division between kernel and userspace doesn't much matter.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#133

Post by monadic2 »

moron4hire wrote: post #130
RivieraKid wrote: post #57

I'm more excited about the possibility of a high quality desktop OS rather than the kernel. The Linux kernel is great but a great open-source desktop OS doesn't exist today. Specifically, this product doesn't exist today: - Desktop environment that matches or surpasses Mac OS in quality, performance and UX design. - It includes seamless synchronization between devices. - Apps are sandboxed, similarly to Android or iO…

You just described UWP apps on Windows 10. Developers flat out rejected it because of the smartphone-like sandboxing.

Can you elaborate? What is UWP and why did devs not like it? All the critique i see with a quick google comes from game devs.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#134

Post by close04 »

geodel wrote: post #75
cletus wrote: post #31

Ah, Fuchsia... another of Google's solutions looking for a problem. I remember hearing about it and immediately asking "what is the market for this?" and not being satisfied with the answer. On the one side you have Samsung, who are unhappy enough with their dependence on Google that they'll not likely eat the cost of moving from Android to something else that has no strategic benefit to them (as far as I could tell,…

> On the one side you have Samsung, who are unhappy enough with their dependence on Google that they'll not likely eat the cost of moving from Android to something else... Strange argument. Maybe they will move all their devices to their own superior OS Tizen. Or maybe they tried and it did not turn out very well. So whichever side Samsung is it does not affect Google. There are many phone makers not that many phone…

> Maybe they will move all their devices to their own superior OS Tizen. Or maybe they tried and it did not turn out very well.

Google (via the Open Handset Alliance) managed to enforce the current status quo. Manufacturers can't simultaneously ship their own OS like forked versions of Android, or presumably Tizen, and still be allowed to use Google Play Services. It's all-Google or nothing. I don't know whether Tizen is superior or not but one could assume it isn't simply due to the lacking ecosystem. Windows Phone was a good OS. It was shot in the foot by a weak app ecosystem.

> So whichever side Samsung is it does not affect Google.

Samsung has 20% of the market and a lot more of the high end market. Going with "not Google" means a lot of users no longer using Google Play Store and services. It most certainly would "affect" Google.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#135

Post by BubRoss »

moron4hire wrote: post #130
RivieraKid wrote: post #57

I'm more excited about the possibility of a high quality desktop OS rather than the kernel. The Linux kernel is great but a great open-source desktop OS doesn't exist today. Specifically, this product doesn't exist today: - Desktop environment that matches or surpasses Mac OS in quality, performance and UX design. - It includes seamless synchronization between devices. - Apps are sandboxed, similarly to Android or iO…

You just described UWP apps on Windows 10. Developers flat out rejected it because of the smartphone-like sandboxing.

I don't think anyone rejected it because of sandboxing. It is a new API that would only work on windows with that installed. Learning something completely new for a niche target is not very enticing. Also, if you can write something to be sandboxed, there is a good chance it can be a web page instead.

Sandboxing also needs to come from the other direction.

Having programs be made to be sandboxed defeats the purpose. What is needed is the ability to do contain all of a program's files in one place and isolate the access to the file system with permissions for other resources.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#136

Post by qchris »

Iolaum wrote: post #25
nicoburns wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of the userland pieces are in Rust. I don't think Rust gives you much advantage for kernel code (esp. in a microkernel), because most of it is unsafe anyway. And Rust has some missing pieces for this kind of code (for example, using custom allocators on a per-data structure basis is still difficult).

I wonder if that's true for RedoxOS microkernel [0]? I m not technical enough to make the comparison myself. [0]: https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/kernel

I'm not a developer on it, but I've been following the development pretty closely for a while. IIRC, the lead developer Jeremy Soller states that even though the kernel code does require unsafe blocks, it's actually less common than you might think.

I can't find the source, but for some reason I have it in my head that the percent of Redox kernel code that is unsafe sits at somewhere around 30%, which especially considering the actual LoC of the microkernel vs. a monolith, means much easier code coverage. Again, the exact number might be wrong, but I do know that the kernel is significantly less that 100% unsafe code.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#137

Post by panpanna »

surajrmal wrote: post #132
panpanna wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you on the first part: Linux's best weapon is its community and strong leadership. But in my opinion, the second most important feature of Linux is in fact its ability to change large parts of the kernel when and if needed. And do it very very quickly. And this something microkernels cannot do. They are just slower when doing major changes that touch many parts of there OS.

Isn't this more so related to having all relevant code in the same repo rather than about being a monolithic kernel? As long as an OS's out of tree contract with out of tree users is well defined, refactoring code within the repo shouldn't be any more difficult. The fact that Linux's contract is the very obvious division between kernel and userspace doesn't much matter.

I am sure having all code in the same repo helps but I was mainly thinking about how changes across multiple services is often very time consuming in microkernel designs and requires very careful analysis.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#138

Post by teho »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #121
teho wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This keeps getting repeated, but I don’t understand how that would lead to it being the most popular OS there is. There is way more embedded systems than there is Intel CPUs on the market and they often run Linux. Android phones are sold more than four times the amount of PCs a year. I’d assume that most Intel CPUs are deployed in the data centers... that run Linux.

but the cpus deployed in datacenters also run minix. even the ones running linux. or windows

Yeah, but the point was that there is without a doubt more Linux instances running on ARM than there is Intel CPUs in total. Then even from the Intel processors that do have Minix, a sizable amount is running Linux. Therefore Minix can’t be nearly as widely used as Linux.

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#139

Post by mlang23 »

Spooky. I predicted the double descriptor read bug before actually seeing the code. I am not an expert, and I definitely haven't written my own USB stack. Still, I wonder why the original code had this problem, given that this seems to be the classical example of how to attack a USB stack. Somehow reminds me what happened when Cisco started to ship a HTTP server with some switches. One of the first bugs was a buffer overflow on URLs longer then 255 bytes ...

Re: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

#140

Post by dfasdjlf »

RivieraKid wrote: post #97
krn wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Linux (Beta) for ChromeOS[1] should eliminate most of these limitations. There is also Fedora Silverblue[2], which is an immutable desktop OS. [1] https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en [2] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/

But that would basically make it an awkward Linux distribution that doesn't have much benefits over the existing ones. It seems like an afterthought, a second class citizen. Where's the documentation for Chrome OS SDK (for native apps)?

> Where's the documentation for Chrome OS SDK (for native apps)?

https://developer.android.com/topic/arc

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