71–80 of 191 posts
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Thanks for the info. For those of us not familiar with it, what were the main motivations for building Fuchsia instead of just using Linux?
I'm sure there's technical reasons, but from Google's perspective, one benefit has got to be the non-copyleft license.
I haven’t watched this talk, but I worked on Fuchsia from the start (I’m no longer at Google) and want to clear up some common questions and misconceptions: 1. Fuchsia is a general-purpose operating system built to support Google’s consumer hardware. 2. It’s not designed to compete with or replace Android. Its goal is to replace Linux, which Android is built on. One big challenge it addresses is Linux’s driver proble…
Instead of a moonshot micro kernel, why didn't Google just build and maintain a new Linux driver API/ABI layer with backwards compatibility and security? Not an easy endeavor, but is it harder than Fuchsia?
https://siliconsignals.io/blog/implementing-custom-hardware-...
That's why you used to not touch vendor partition when flashing a custom ROM etc..
I haven’t watched this talk, but I worked on Fuchsia from the start (I’m no longer at Google) and want to clear up some common questions and misconceptions: 1. Fuchsia is a general-purpose operating system built to support Google’s consumer hardware. 2. It’s not designed to compete with or replace Android. Its goal is to replace Linux, which Android is built on. One big challenge it addresses is Linux’s driver proble…
I was never that close to the Fuchsia project, but knew quite a few people who worked on it. My understanding from them was, as much as I can remember it now, something like: 1. That yes, Fuchsia was originally intended, by at least some in senior leadership on the team, to replace both Android and ChromeOS. This is why Fuchsia had a mobile shell (or two?) at one point. 2. The Android team wasn't necessarily on board…
I think the best way to look at it is like any software: there's Fuchsia The Artifact (thing that is made) and Fuchsia The Product (how thing is used, and how widely). I don't know anything about operating systems, but my understanding is that the engineers are very happy with Fuchsia The Artifact. Fuchsia The Product has had some wandering in the wilderness years.
I wish message passing and capabilities based OS had taken off stronger in the 80s because I sometimes feel like there are design goals and approaches latent in what we do now, which we could have been advanced in before now, beyond research models.
ios is capabilities based, no? Edit, to explain: in ios, everything revolves around mach ports, which are capabilities. https://docs.darlinghq.org/internals/macos-specifics/mach-po...
At one level, it proves the model. The shame is that Mach otherwise has kind of not taken off. Gnu the OS was going to be Mach at the core, at one point IIRC
Some have suggested Fuchsia was never intended to replace Android. That's either a much later pivot (after I left Google) or it's historical revisionism. It absolutely was intended to replace Android and a bunch of ex-Android people were involved with it from the start. The basic premise was:
1. Linux's driver situation for Android is fundamentally broken and (in the opinion of the Fuchsia team) cannot be fixed. Windows, for example, spent a lot of time on this issue to isolate issues within drivers to avoid kernel panics. Also, Microsoft created a relatively stable ABI for drivers. Linux doesn't do that. The process of upstreaming drivers is tedious and (IIRC) it often doesn't happen; and
2. (Again, in the opinion of the Fuchsia team) Android needed an ecosystem reset. I think this was a little more vague and, from what I could gather, meant different things to different people. But Android has a strange architecture. Certain parts are in the AOSP but an increasing amount was in what was then called Google Play Services. IIRC, an example was an SSL library. AOSP had one. Play had one.
Fuchsia, at least at the time, pretty much moved everything (including drivers) from kernel space into user space. More broadly. Fuchsia can be viewed in a similar way to, say, Plan9 and micro-kernel architectures as a whole. Some think this can work. Some people who are way more knowledgeable and experienced on OS design seem to be pretty vocal saying it can't because of the context-switching. You can find such treatises online.
In my opinion, Fuchsia always struck me as one of those greenfield vanity projects meant to keep very senior engineers. Put another way: it was a solution in search of a problem. You can argue the flaws in Android architecture are real but remember, Google doesn't control the hardware. At that time at least, it was Samsung. It probably still is. Samsung doesn't like being beholden to Google. They've tried (and failed) to create their own OS. Why would they abandon one ecosystem they don't control for another they don't control? If you can't answer that, then you shouldn't be investing billions (quite literally) into the project.
Stepping back a bit, Eric Schmidt when he was CEO seemed to hold the view that ChromeOS and Android could coexist. They could compete with one another. There was no need to "unify" them. So often, such efforts to unify different projects just lead to billions of dollars spent, years of stagnation and a product that is the lowest common denominator of the things it "unified". I personally thought it was smart not to bother but I also suspect at some point someone would because that's always what happens. Microsoft completely missed the mobile revolution by trying to unify everything under Windows OS. Apple were smart to leave iOS and MacOS separate.
The only fruit of this investment and a decade of effort by now is Nest devices. I believe they tried (and failed) to embed themselves with Chromecast
But I imagine a whole bunch of people got promoted and isn't that the real point?
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Sure, but it is allowed, at least as far as I understand, to phone home if it otherwise needs network access. In practice it’s really hard to prevent unauthorized semantic network access once you allow any network access. The main benefit is that kernel space is drastically smaller which means that the opportunity for a kernel-level exploit is minimal vs something like the Linux kernel that a single device exploit co…
The joy of having a properly implemented capability system is that, well, you can create arbitrary capabilities. You don't need to give a process/component the “unrestricted network access capability” -- you could give it a capability to eg “have https access to this (sub)domain only” where the process wouldn't be able to change stuff like SSL certificates. EDIT: and to be clear, fuchsia implements capabilities very…
Also imagine you are trying to run a browser. It’s implicitly going to be able to perform arbitrary network access and there’s no way you can restrict it from phoning home asides from trying to play whackamole blocking access to specific subdomains you think are it’s phone home servers.
That’s why I said “semantic” capabilities aren’t a thing and I’m not aware of anyone who’s managed to propose a workable system.
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Sure, but it is allowed, at least as far as I understand, to phone home if it otherwise needs network access. In practice it’s really hard to prevent unauthorized semantic network access once you allow any network access. The main benefit is that kernel space is drastically smaller which means that the opportunity for a kernel-level exploit is minimal vs something like the Linux kernel that a single device exploit co…
Most components don't need to talk to the network though and therefore do not. The ones that do can do powerful things but creating narrower capabilities to restrict what they can do is very much feasible.
I'm surprised this is still being worked on I was under the impression that Google abandoned this. Also, I would be interested to see a comparison to the wasm component model as it also seems to want to do the same things docker containers do.
I think the lack of public information about their future plans for the project combined with the “killed by Google” meme got smashed together here and that is actually a really common perception but also one that is completely made up out of thin air. It has been under heavy heavy development for many years now. The fact that they are now starting to talk about it publicly now is probably a sign that they are lookin…
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> A monolithic kernel with a clearly defined device driver API would do the same thing. Maybe, but I doubt it. History has shown pretty clearly that driver authors will write code that takes advantage of its privilege state in a monolithic kernel to bypass the constraints of the driver API. Companies will do this to kludge around the GPL, to make their Linux driver look more like the Windows driver, because they were…
It's still possible that drivers might be so buggy that a newer OS version might interact with them in a slightly different way which is still legal by the API definition but it still makes them crash or stop working.
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> The answer is not much time. That would be surprising. Where do you get that? I don't mean toy OSes or experiments. Linux, MacOS and Windows are still in development and I can't imagine the number of hours invested. > they use existing libraries and the like Where can I find out about that? Thanks.
IIRC it didn't take that long to develop first production versions of macOS? A couple of years maybe? It's not like Fuschia was supposed to be a "fully capable OS developed from scratch", either? I mean it's "just" the kernel and other low level components, most of the software stack would remain same as Android/Linux at least for the time being.
Ok, I'll bite. If we're talking classic Macintosh OS, perhaps.[0] macOS? No way. The first Mac OS X was released in 2001, and was in development between 1997 and 2001 according to Wikipedia.[1] But the bulk of the OS already existed 1997. Mac OS X was a reskin of NeXTStep. NeXTStep was released in 1989, final release 1995, final preview 1997 (just before Apple sold out to NeXT).[2] NeXTStep was in production for quite some time before the x86 version shipped (around '95 from memory). In case you are wondering, I can assure you that NeXTStep was a very capable OS. NeXTStep was in development for a couple of years before the first hardware shipped in 1989. NeXTStep was built on top of Mach and BSD 4.3 userspace. Mach's initial release was 1985.[3]. Not sure how long the first release of Mach took to develop. You can check BSD history yourself. But I'd say, conservatively, that macOS took at least 14 years to develop.
[0] check https://folklore.org/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_operating_systems