Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

opensource.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 334 posts

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#131

Post by ogre_codes »

outworlder wrote: post #110

> Fuchsia is a long-term project to create a general-purpose, open source operating system Why do we need this? We have Linux. It works. It is open-source, general purpose. It needs more support to become more mainstream (like what Valve has done with Proton). Don't like Linux? Start with one of the BSDs. Heck, start with Haiku. Any of these projects are lightyears ahead of anything that's just starting. The most lik…

> Why do we need this?

About the biggest piece I can see which benefits the outside world is the fact that Fuchsia's drivers are independent of kernel version. This is one of the biggest pain points for Android upgrades.

A Fuchsia based kernel upgrade won't be held hostage by lack of Qualcomm/ Nvidia/ Mediatec binary drivers.

But mostly, I suspect Google just wants an OS that isn't burdened by GPL.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#132

Post by johncolanduoni »

outworlder wrote: post #110

> Fuchsia is a long-term project to create a general-purpose, open source operating system Why do we need this? We have Linux. It works. It is open-source, general purpose. It needs more support to become more mainstream (like what Valve has done with Proton). Don't like Linux? Start with one of the BSDs. Heck, start with Haiku. Any of these projects are lightyears ahead of anything that's just starting. The most lik…

None of these are microkernels with a strict capabilities model. Open source isn’t the only desirable property of a kernel, and Unix is probably not the last word in advancements of general purpose OS APIs.

One application they’re probably interested in is a sandbox/containerization system with a drastically smaller surface area than the Linux primitives. That’s what excites me, we may get to the point where things like Firecracker VM and gVisor are no longer needed for robust isolation.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#133

Post by brundolf »

outworlder wrote: post #110

> Fuchsia is a long-term project to create a general-purpose, open source operating system Why do we need this? We have Linux. It works. It is open-source, general purpose. It needs more support to become more mainstream (like what Valve has done with Proton). Don't like Linux? Start with one of the BSDs. Heck, start with Haiku. Any of these projects are lightyears ahead of anything that's just starting. The most lik…

Surely we've learned a few things about designing systems since 1991 (and the hardware landscape has changed just a little bit in that time too). A new, from-scratch OS should be able to make some huge leaps with all of that new hindsight, and without all of that legacy baggage. It's an enormous task, of course, but if anybody has the research-cash to throw at it, Google does.

Of course from a business perspective it's definitely a power-grab, just like Chrome was. But from a technical perspective I think it makes a ton of sense.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#134

Post by flotzam »

hacknat wrote: post #125
flotzam wrote: post #70

If contributing to your project requires much more than git commit --signoff — in Fuchsia's case, a full-on Google Account! — this will exclude many pseudonymous developers who conceive of things such as privacy in terms of capabilities (not pinky promises). Which seems relevant for a security-focused OS.

You can't pseudonymously contribute to most OSes of note. Linux for example.

I'd just like to interject for moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but

sure you can contribute to the Linux kernel pseudonymously. Think of a plausible name, "git commit --signoff", and you're good to go. There's no enforcement of slave names for kernel contributions, it's all just a minimally viable legal fiction.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#135

Post by bestorworse »

epage wrote: post #80
mmastrac wrote: post #4

I've heard Fuchsia referred to as a "principal engineer retention project" at Google. I'd be curious to know if others have heard the same.

For all on this thread involved, thank you! Since I was got into programming in middle school, I was obsessed with OS design (yeah, reading the source code for L4 in high school). As I went further in my education, I felt the landscape was pretty stagnate at this point and went into other areas (initially driver development and now developer tooling). While I've not had a chance to jump over to Fuschia to participate…

When looking more closely on Fuchsia architecture you might well be back into OS design obsession. As the kernel is, IMHO strongly based on a microkernel design, the OS APIs presents itself as userspace APIs. They are in fact, defined by what the userspace implements. And there is a lot of freedom on how to implement this API.

The majority of microkernel based OSes just implement these APIs to emulate UNIX APIs and that IMHO is a waste of potential but understandable in order to be backward compatible and not have to develop whole new userspace applications from scratch.

But I really like Fuchsia's take on the design of this userspace and the way the 'capability security model' is integrated into it. The amount of APIs built into the base 'Fuchsia platform' really blurs the line between and OS and a stack with OS plus essential services. Today, IMHO, things like automatic updates, software distribution, crash reports, and other low level application centric facilities should really be provided by the OS and that is done in the base Fuchsia platform.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#136

Post by bayindirh »

endymi0n wrote: post #129
outworlder wrote: post #110

> Fuchsia is a long-term project to create a general-purpose, open source operating system Why do we need this? We have Linux. It works. It is open-source, general purpose. It needs more support to become more mainstream (like what Valve has done with Proton). Don't like Linux? Start with one of the BSDs. Heck, start with Haiku. Any of these projects are lightyears ahead of anything that's just starting. The most lik…

Why do we need Krita when we have GIMP? Because every once in a while, it‘s easier to free yourself from the shackles of architectural decisions that were made because of the hardware and constraints of their time that are obsolete now but are supported for legacy reasons. A security model that is designed from scratch into such a deep OS concern as with Fuchsia is one of the aspects that would be next to impossible…

For me, OS research is always good. Experimenting from ground up is even better.

But Minix, the hero of the Microkernel research, became the guardian of Intel systems and preventer of tinkering and exploration.

Can we certainly say that Fuschia will be Free and mild natured like BSD and Linux or will it become another silent "hard-layer" like Minix?

GP (and I) certainly fear about the latter. Given Google's transformation to Modern day Microsoft of the 90s, it's not too far-fetched it seems.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#138

Post by jcranmer »

outworlder wrote: post #110

> Fuchsia is a long-term project to create a general-purpose, open source operating system Why do we need this? We have Linux. It works. It is open-source, general purpose. It needs more support to become more mainstream (like what Valve has done with Proton). Don't like Linux? Start with one of the BSDs. Heck, start with Haiku. Any of these projects are lightyears ahead of anything that's just starting. The most lik…

There is definitely room to innovate more fundamentally in operating system design. POSIX is effectively a 50-year old API, and there are definitely places where the API it provides is far from optimal.

For something that interests me personally, the POSIX idea of ptrace and signals for debugging is a fundamentally broken and obtuse API that just don't work very well with how modern software is designed, and requires a decent amount of hacks to do anything rational with hardware traps. I did think a little bit about what kind of API I wanted if I were designing de novo, and happened to pop through Fuchsia's API at a glance to see what it decided... and it was exactly the kind of way I'd have thought about this space.

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#139

Post by e12e »

205g0 wrote: post #65

OT: Just a second ago, I was setting up unattended-upgrades for security updates for a new Ubuntu box and I am once again puzzled why the largest Linux distribution has such an underwhelming UX for an crucial feature. Long story short, I welcome any new contender in the OS space.

What's underwhelming about?:

  sudo apt install unattended-upgrades

Re: Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

#140

Post by trasz »

endymi0n wrote: post #129
outworlder wrote: post #110

> Fuchsia is a long-term project to create a general-purpose, open source operating system Why do we need this? We have Linux. It works. It is open-source, general purpose. It needs more support to become more mainstream (like what Valve has done with Proton). Don't like Linux? Start with one of the BSDs. Heck, start with Haiku. Any of these projects are lightyears ahead of anything that's just starting. The most lik…

Why do we need Krita when we have GIMP? Because every once in a while, it‘s easier to free yourself from the shackles of architectural decisions that were made because of the hardware and constraints of their time that are obsolete now but are supported for legacy reasons. A security model that is designed from scratch into such a deep OS concern as with Fuchsia is one of the aspects that would be next to impossible…

FreeBSD has supported capability-based security model for a decade now: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?capsicum.
Post reply on HN