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Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system

372 pointsby tapperalmost 5 years ago

21 comments

RivieraKidalmost 5 years ago
I&#x27;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&#x27;t exist today.<p>Specifically, this product doesn&#x27;t exist today:<p>- Desktop environment that matches or surpasses Mac OS in quality, performance and UX design.<p>- It includes seamless synchronization between devices.<p>- Apps are sandboxed, similarly to Android or iOS.<p>- There is a clearly defined platform &#x2F; SDK, like in Android or iOS. If it works in your development environment, it&#x27;s guaranteed to work everywhere.<p>- You can easily make a commercial product, like in Android or iOS.<p>- It has 10% on the market (or software creators believe it&#x27;s on the trajectory to get there).<p>I don&#x27;t understand why Google hasn&#x27;t done this yet. Of course, the answer could be that such project just doesn&#x27;t have the required ROI.
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cletusalmost 5 years ago
Ah, Fuchsia... another of Google&#x27;s solutions looking for a problem.<p>I remember hearing about it and immediately asking &quot;what is the market for this?&quot; and not being satisfied with the answer.<p>On the one side you have Samsung, who are unhappy enough with their dependence on Google that they&#x27;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, anyway).<p>So what does that leave? Google making its own devices. I don&#x27;t know this to be the case but I strongly suspect the intent was for the Pixel line was (and may still be?) intended to be the spark for Google being a vertically integrated first-party seller of mobile devices. What I mean is these aren&#x27;t just proof-of-concept or developer devices.<p>The problem there is by doing that they&#x27;ll hurt their relationships with Android OEMs and it&#x27;d take a long time to fill that void, if that&#x27;s even possible.<p>So where else? The obvious answer is... Chromecast. This is a hardware product Google has had a good amount of success with. It&#x27;s already first-party.<p>A recently leaked report [1] seems to indicate that the next Chromecast will be Android TV. That is (IMHO) <i>bad</i> news for Fuchsia.<p>You have to also take into account that during the time Fuchsia has been around (which must be 4+ years by now?) there&#x27;s been a change at the top with Sundar replacing Larry. That&#x27;s always a dangerous time for high-profile and high-cost (literally $billions) projects with no customers. Sundar came from Chrome. Fuchsia didn&#x27;t. You have to ask questions about who was the original (SVP+) cheerleader who got it off the ground and funded it? Was larry on board? Is Sundar&#x2F; Does that sponsor enjoy the same support under Sundar that they did under Larry?<p>I don&#x27;t know the answer to these questions, just that they matter. marissa Mayer&#x27;s departure from Google was largely a product of a change at the top as she enjoyed Eric&#x27;s favour but all signs pointed to Larry not being as big as a fan.<p>Fuchsia probably should&#x27;ve been called Graphene. Graphene can do everything but leave the lab, after all.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;googles-leaked-tv-dongle-looks-like-a-merger-of-android-tv-and-chromecast&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;googles-leaked-tv-do...</a>
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kyaghmouralmost 5 years ago
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&#x27;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&#x27;s the Rocky Balboa of operating systems. It may loose the first round, but it always come back. And the reason for that is that Linux&#x27;s biggest feature isn&#x27;t necessarily technical. Rather, it&#x27;s the community of people around it, the fact that it can tolerate a healthy dose of disagreement and infighting before eventually finding and settling on whatever best solution solves the next immediate problem, not some far-into-future idealistic goal. The downside to that development model is that radical changes take several iterations&#x2F;years while in a centrally-managed OS development model can be shoved in &quot;atomically&quot; -- ex: real-time, tracing, etc. You can devise many a great OSes on paper and even implement them. Bootstrapping an entire ecosystem and, effectively, institutionalize a completely open and nimble development model such as that of the Linux kernel is a whole other story.
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harryfalmost 5 years ago
Didn&#x27;t see the article address power management in the context of things that might be running idle in the background. That would seem to be to be a major incentive for an OS that&#x27;s going be used on mobile, which needs to respond to changes in environment on the move (changing WLAN, network, beacons etc.)<p>Blackberry&#x27;s QNX ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;QNX" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;QNX</a> ) is a microkernel architecture and was designed with this in mind - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.qnx.com&#x2F;developers&#x2F;docs&#x2F;6.3.0SP3&#x2F;neutrino&#x2F;sys_arch&#x2F;power.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.qnx.com&#x2F;developers&#x2F;docs&#x2F;6.3.0SP3&#x2F;neutrino&#x2F;sys_ar...</a> ...<p>&gt; Traditional power management (PM) is aimed at conserving the power of computers that are usually left on. The general-purpose approach to PM for desktop PCs -- or even for &quot;mobile&quot; PCs, such as laptops -- doesn&#x27;t take into account the specific demands of embedded systems, which can be off (or on standby) much of the time, yet must respond to external events in predictable ways.<p>I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s inherently more efficient to implement this type of thing with a microkernel but given the iBeacons and similar effectively &quot;failed&quot; ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;venturebeat.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;27&#x2F;why-android-nearby-ibeacons-and-eddystone-failed-to-gain-traction&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;venturebeat.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;27&#x2F;why-android-nearby-ibeaco...</a>) due to power and sensitivity, this could be a big enough incentive to start a new OS
bsaulalmost 5 years ago
I&#x27;m both very excited someone is taking a shot at trying something new on kernel side. But i can&#x27;t help wonder about what would a future look like where 90% of hardware run on a Google-owned operating system.
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modelessalmost 5 years ago
It seems such a waste to spend all the effort to write a whole new OS and all these drivers with the same old buffer overflow bugs we&#x27;ve been fighting since the dawn of time. It doesn&#x27;t have to be this way anymore!
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smallstepformanalmost 5 years ago
Ex BeOS developers are the core team behind Fuchsia (Travis Geiselbrecht and Brian Swetland). Travis wrote NewOS which was adapted to be the Haiku kernel (and Travis still hangs around the Haiku IRC channels every now and then). I wouldn&#x27;t be suprised to see Haiku R2 transition to Fuchsia kernel since they share the same DNA.
snarfyalmost 5 years ago
The technical reasons for Fuchsia to exist are debatable. The real reason it exists is because Linux is GPL.
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sk0galmost 5 years ago
I thought it was going to be some boring material UI screenshots, but this is so much more interesting! Susceptible to the usual C bugs, albeit with minor impact. I thought they were switching most of the kernel and drivers to Rust, for some reason.<p>Edit: not a Rust fanboy by any means, hell, I&#x27;ve never even opened a Rust file.
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pier25almost 5 years ago
A couple of years ago it was believed that Fuchsia would replace Android and ChromeOS. Then, IIRC, it was said in a Google IO that it was just some sort of experiment to test new OS ideas.<p>What do you think is Google&#x27;s masterplan for Fuchsia?
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malkiaalmost 5 years ago
I can&#x27;t get fuchsia to work anymore on my Acer device. It used to work just 10 days ago, hopefully gonna fixed soon :) - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ci.chromium.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;fuchsia&#x2F;builders&#x2F;global.ci&#x2F;workstation.x64-release&#x2F;b8877947158353867984" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ci.chromium.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;fuchsia&#x2F;builders&#x2F;global.ci&#x2F;worksta...</a>?<p>(e.g. I&#x27;m compiling for --release workstation.x64 --with-base ... the kitchen-sink)
ikeyanyalmost 5 years ago
I would love to see an interactive map of Zircon, similar to the one of the (older) Linux kernel - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;makelinux.github.io&#x2F;kernel&#x2F;map&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;makelinux.github.io&#x2F;kernel&#x2F;map&#x2F;</a>
ThinkBeatalmost 5 years ago
I fully welcome some more competiton on the operating system front.<p>I am sad to see WindowsNT, Linux and macOS be the only dominant operating systems.<p>My personal very perhaps unpopular view is that Windows NT has a better technial implentation than Linux.<p>Linux does most things well, form small devices to big iron. That is true now.<p>But when it started, it was as a learning experiment, and damn good one too. An amazing achievement. A lot of work my haorsd of people have since built on top of it, replaced things, epanded things, hardening things, adding drivers, etc. And it has come a long way, but to me as an operating system, technically it is not that inspiring.<p>I wish we had maybe 10 competitve opearing systems, some brand new off the presses.<p>I have run Linux in one form or another since the first Yggdrasil release at the end of 1992. (not very early).<p>It was amazing. Running it on my PC at home and it was faster than the terminals at school (well all shared a few servers so always a lot going on, I am sure if you had it all to yourself it would be faster. I guess that is why some people spent the nights there is they had demanding tasks to run, but htye were not a priority to get access to the better, newer and a lot more dedicated hardware. (It was a complicated process).<p>I could do 90% of what was needed at home, woot.<p>I was very happy when I get my paws on the first WindowsNT release back in 1994 I think. I had preordered it.<p>I cold not wait to install it.<p>processor-independent, multiprocessing and multi-user operating system the end of 1992.<p>After having suffered through the pain that was Widows that had a kinda sorts maybe a little multitasking. Finally an improvement. OF course, a lot of my software refused to run on it, or it refused to run it<p>The first Mac I had with macOS was also very cool, since then OpenBSD, I had NextStep when they released it for Intel. Very cool.<p>Anyways I have been waiting since to get a new operating system that levels up the game, as much as WindowsNT did for Windows 3.11, 95, 98, me.<p>I have not yet had that privilege.<p>I had good hopes for Plan9, QNX, a reimplementation fo BeOS that is still ongoing. (I might have the wrong name on that one. I remember a demo I had at the university of a BeBox with the BeOs and how well it multitasked what backed then seemed like very CPU intensive graphics manipulation while playing a video and some other stuff -at the time-... I never got a BeBox and havent run its OS)<p>There have been, and are some solid research OSs but they have never made it out into the real world.<p>WindowsNT, Linux and macOS cannot be all we are given. What replaces them?<p>Where is WindowsNTNT.<p>Will it take quantum computers to become the norm before we get it? Maybe Linux already runs on that too.<p>(if quantum computers ever become viable or even a good fit for everyday boring computer stuff).<p>Give me a new operating system, written from scratch, to implement every secure feature it should have, harden it, eliminate even the possibility of buffer overflows and assorted tasks, or create them so that the elements that are exposed can fail gracefully and non-destructbily and not leak data or allow inputting of data.<p>I forgot about Qubes OS, that is very interesting. Maybe that is it.
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miohtamaalmost 5 years ago
Assuming most (not all) vulnerabilities are C-style use after free and buffer overflows. If kernel were written in Rust these vulnerabilities would not be issues? Meaning microkernels only make sense in C world. What am I missing?
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SV_BubbleTimealmost 5 years ago
CTRL-F dart<p>No matches.<p>I wonder how many people can look past the kernel when discussing what this is and how it’s different from Android?
6gvONxR4sf7oalmost 5 years ago
Would an OS like this mean really really tough DRM?
li4ickalmost 5 years ago
Greg Kroah-Hartman told me it&#x27;s 40 times slower than Linux, at least that&#x27;s what he told me 1 year ago. Wonder how that&#x27;s changed...
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mlang23almost 5 years ago
Spooky. I predicted the double descriptor read bug before actually seeing the code. I am not an expert, and I definitely haven&#x27;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 ...
t43562almost 5 years ago
C++....microkernel....reminds me of Symbian. :-)
jcun4128almost 5 years ago
Hmm I was looking at this expecting GUI screenshots, but interesting non-the less&#x2F;beyond me my scope at this time but neat to read about.
wackgetalmost 5 years ago
&quot;Fuchsia is a new operating system developed by Google&quot;- and I&#x27;m out.