Which architectures have fuchsia ports? And what cpu feature/device support is needed to port fuchsia?
Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub
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Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need an offline smart assistant: https://medevel.com/10-open-source-voice-assistants/
I think in this case it would be called an alarm clock.
Yes, while one could make the case that I should purchase and plug one more thing into my wall. Would it be impossible to place a small amount of memory on the board that remembers alarm settings? If this thing is built as a convenience, I don't want to have a bunch of other devices for convenience (a radio, a noise generator, an intercom....)
Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
Implementing capability-based security in a typical Unix (and thus Linux) is definitely possible, see FreeBSD's Capsicum.
I don't know a lot about Capsicum, but from what I remember (and see from their website) it adds capabilities to FreeBSD but doesn't make them mandatory. As such, it is a tool to build compartimentalized applications. It does not provide a comprehensive solution to sandbox existing applications, and does not remove the ambiant-authority model. It is a better, safer chroot(). Fuchsia, on the other hand, is built on to…
To put it differently, in FreeBSD the application has to explicitly enter the capability mode, while in Fuchsia it doesn't have that choice.
Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub
#294I came here for a technical discussion about Fuchsia and it's microkernel approach instead this is mostly fill with complains about Google as a company. Is there a social justice forum I can visit where I may be able to have a technical discussion about Fuchsia?
I think the cause of this phenomenon is that most HN readers are not qualified to comment on Fuchsia, are ignorant of any and all facts about it, but are also compelled to comment. So you get this thread, and most threads here. Actual technical exchange between people who are both not obviously wrong is rare here.
I wouldn’t say rare. But yes, the phenomenon you describe definitely takes place quite a lot.
Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub
#295Never trust a company without a customer service department.
Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub
#296Never trust a company without a customer service department.
Love how the insecure people downvote such a fact.
Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub
#297Google has officially outdid itself in under-marketing a major platform.
A brand new OS, and... barely anything even on hacker news. No barrage of media leading up to the annoucement.
Is this basically a boondoggle being relegated to IoT?
Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub
#298What problem does Fuchsia solve? Google already has at least three other operating systems to use. On the other hand, Google has never seemed particularly shy about starting something new rather than work on something old. I'm thinking of their messaging systems that they start every couple of years. Also, the branding isn't great. The top image in the linked story immediately makes me think this has something to do…
My wild guess is it reduces the amount of privileged code. In Linux the entire kernel (all 20 million lines of it), can do what it damned well pleases, and auditing 20M lines of code is mission impossible. You could think of it in terms of Windows/OSX/Linux Distro vs Android / iOS / WinPhone. In the former, this is nothing stopping one application stomping over anothers data. The result has been endless uninstallable viruses and malware. The latter force complete almost isolation between applications. What interaction does happen occurs over interfaces that are very heavily policed by the OS (think: is generally doesn't happen without the user giving some permission). The result has been a revolution: almost no one bothers with anti virus software on the phone OS's any more, and any malware you do install can be uninstalled with the click of a button.
Fuschsia, being a micro kernel, puts each functional unit (device driver, network protocol driver, file system, crypto functions, yada yada) into its own isolated process, so the damage a rogue function unit can do is more limited. Interaction between functional units must happen via the Fuschsia kernel (they can't talk directly), and surprise surprise Fuschsia heavily polices those interactions using the "capabilities" provided by the kernel. Capabilities are are very similar to user assigned permissions.
That seems obvious and attractive, but keeping those processes isolated and policing those permissions incurs a overhead, or perhaps more accurately the cost of communication between two isolated processes is much higher than non-isolated (think processes communicating with pipes vs memory sharing threads). In Linux that overhead is still visible as the syscall overhead, which is large enough that high performance applications go out of their way to avoid it. io_uring is another attempt to avoid it. Microkernels multiplies that overhead by many times. Possibly worse, that overhead is getting worse with the advent of spectre like cache timing attacks forcing cache's to be invalidated on a context switch.
In my very brief look at Fuschsia is looked refreshingly clean, small and well thought out. But then all many projects do. Sadly it started like as a C++ code that is now moving towards (as in is now 50%) Rust. To be true to it's safety goals it should all be Rust. And it doesn't seem to bring much new stuff to the table. seL4 has been in the same space for the same reasons for years how. So I don't see how Fuschsia's introduction will change the basic equation that's lead to the dominance of monolithic kernels.
What both seL4 and Fuschsia both desperately need is some magical hardware solution to "isolated process communication" overhead, one that also addresses spectre. Mind you, if a way to isolate code with bugger all overhead came along, it's so attractive I suspect they would be in a race with the existing monolithic kernels to exploit it.
Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the discussion cannot be really detached, since Google has strong ambitions that will undeniably influence features and capabilities of their OS. But as for the microkernel approach, I think the advantages are on the table, but they are theoretical. Until now, no OS with a micro architecture was successful at getting significant market share. What would your requirements at an OS like this be? For me, it woul…
>Until now, no OS with a micro architecture was successful at getting significant market share. Not sure in what sense you mean this. Minix may be the most common OS on the planet. Intel embedded it in an quite a number of its products.
You're for sure not using Minix consciously
Re: Google is officially releasing Fuchsia OS, starting with a first-gen Nest Hub
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t worry, they’ll abandon it in a year or two because not enough people use it.
Nah, it's an hardware-related project, so it will get entrenched even if it's fundamentally different from other hardware-related Google projects. Eventually you'll be able to buy Google devices that run Android, Google devices that run ChromeOS, and Google devices that run Fuchsia. It will be confusing, but that's fine, because it will all work great as long as you stick to Google's cloud-based services , which is w…
Plenty of Google hardware stuff didn't make it, at least, Glass and more recently, Stadia.