Why Is Google Building a New Operating System from Scratch?

https://www.fastcompany.com/3063006/why-on-earth-is-google-building-a-new-operating-system-from-scratch?_utm_source=1-2-2

by bertazure • 9 years ago

103 89 9 years ago

fastcompany.com

blacksmith_tb• 9 years ago

Needs a [2016] doesn't it? Not that Fuschia isn't interesting...

paulddraper• 9 years ago

Yeah. Not that this is bad, but there are lots of more up-to-date articles on Fushcia.

E.g. from May https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/googles-fuchsia-smar...

bertazure2• 9 years ago

Yeah! By the way, there is this mention of 3D world in Armadillo User Shell: https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/#/q/3d+world

Can you please try to elaborate on this?

bertazure2• 9 years ago

Yup, but I missed that. Can I do it afterwards? P.S: I'm new to hackernews, and I don't have the technical knowledge of living here. I was just curious to listen to you guys/gals what you think of this article.

And this article was mentioned by one of the Fuchsia Dev: https://twitter.com/chrismckillop/status/767479164785991680

PhantomGremlin• 9 years ago

Antagonistic headline.

The article does a pretty good job of answering the question: Linux is bloated, isn't real time, and has IP issues.

igravious• 9 years ago

Linux is modular, you can remove the parts you don't want.

Linux has multiple real-time varietals.

Linux has no IP issues that I know of.

ahartmetz2• 9 years ago

IP issue: Google doesn't have the right to give hardware vendors a pass on proprietary drivers for Linux. Ignoring the problem seems to work so far, though.

That said, a stable driver API with the possibility to update the kernel without updating drivers is probably more important to Google. In the best case (and I expect a worse result than that) it means that Android phones can be updated for a long time without requiring support from the vendor.

The damn vendors should just upstream the damn drivers. Drivers for embedded hardware are such a clusterfuck. You have no idea how bad it is unless you have worked in that space.

cwyers• 9 years ago

And Google has done that -- for instance, they use Binder for IPC instead of dbus/kdbus on Android. But every time Google does that, they pay a price for using Linux, as they have to maintain anything in the kernel that doesn't make it upstream.

The reason Google cares about this, as noted elsewhere, is that there is no stable kernel ABI for drivers, so vendors who release drivers-as-blobs, fail to release the driver source code (yes, it's a GPL violation; yes, it happens anyways) or otherwise pin their driver to a specific ABI need to release new drivers every time the kernel changes. Google would love to release Android versions independently of drivers, the way Windows works.

CryoLogic2• 9 years ago

Interestingly enough, if you look at the Linux kernel in terms of LOC, it is lower than Win7/8/10 which are lower than MacOSX.

blibble• 9 years ago

that's quite impressive as Linux also contains the source code for mountains of hardware, from the most ancient to (almost) the most modern

pmoriarty2• 9 years ago

"Linux is bloated, isn't real time, and has IP issues."

There have been real-time kernels for Linux. They're kind of important for people using Linux for professional audio (and doubtlessly other fields as well).

planteen• 9 years ago

Yes. There is the PREEMPT_RT patchset for sub-millisecond response times. Many of the features for PREEMPT_RT have been merged to mainline, so stock performance is quite good to the millisecond level.

rurban3• 9 years ago

But it's leaving out a lot more important stuff:

* Secure and fast micro-kernel.

* Only non-blocking async calls (similar to Microsoft's Singularity).

But they didn't follow through with using managed memory only as Microsoft did, which might catch them some day. Their app-layer does, so it's a problem to solve anyway.

largote• 9 years ago

IMPACT

matthberg• 9 years ago

Um?

6d6b73• 9 years ago

Why? Here is why:

gOS#> dmesg

Grow with Google ads - Get your ad on Google today‎ Adwww.google.com/AdWords‎(888) 971-0642 Reach your customers in the moments that matter. Learn more now. Styles: Search Ads, Banner Ads, Video Ads, Mobile Ads, App Ads Services: Google AdWords, AdWords Express, Google Display Network, YouTube Video Ads, Google M

[15978.846183] PM: Preparing system for mem sleep

[15978.846447] (NULL device *): firmware: direct-loading firmware iwlwifi-6000g2a-6.ucode

[15978.846461] Freezing user space processes ... (elapsed 0.015 seconds) done.

[15978.861750] Freezing remaining freezable tasks ... (elapsed 0.001 seconds) done.

[15978.862917] PM: Entering mem sleep

microwavecamera3• 9 years ago

gOS#> ls ~

File list brought to you by Walmart.com - Get ready for Back to School with low prices on school supplies like Laptops, Backpacks, Calculators, School Uniforms, Notebooks and Dorm Furniture. Free 2 day shipping.

Desktop Documents Downloads Music Pictures Videos

gOS#>

jacquesm• 9 years ago

  gOS#> vi /home/jam/todo.txt

  Quota of ads clicked not reached for the time of day.

  gOS#>

CryoLogic2• 9 years ago

As a Google Fi user, who frequently gets relevant ads immediately after talking about a product on the phone (voice call) with my girlfriend - I do fear a world where Google controls the OS.

Once I also mentioned some tv's I was interested in (not on the phone, but in the same room as the phone) and also got ads right afterwards. I do not know if it was related to an app open or the phone itself, but a scary invasion of privacy nonetheless.

microwavecamera3• 9 years ago

Holy crap that is weird. Well I won't be using Google Fi. I was reading Fi's Terms of Service and came across this gem:

We take protecting your Customer Proprietary Network Information or “CPNI” very seriously.

Using CPNI without your additional approval is limited to specific purposes. By using the Services, you allow us to use, disclose, and permit access to your CPNI without your additional approval only for the following limited purposes:

...

Any other purpose permitted by federal law

So they can use your personal data without your approval for anything that's not illegal? Spurious use of the word "limited" there Google.

infogulch2• 9 years ago

Wait, if that's a limited list, why is there anything listed before "everything not illegal" at all? Are there other things they do that are illegal? Or is that just designed to confuse and mask the last item?

pmoriarty2• 9 years ago

Google will not be evil ... except where permitted by federal law.

asdffdsa321• 9 years ago

For me it's the push notification "how was your stay at Starbucks" .. so creepy

Phrodo_00• 9 years ago

I think you can disable location history/reporting. (I don't because I like looking at my location history, but it IS creepy that it's an opt-out)

rurban3• 9 years ago

I do like the NSA to know where I was at a certain time in history. So that they cannot come up with a random allegation and I do have some proof that at the least my phone was somewhere else.

jk2323• 9 years ago

This sounds interesting. While it is definitely possible to enable, I doubt that this would be legal in many countries.

1. Is there any proof that google "mines" your phone conversations on project fi?

2. Have you done testing? Like, get a friend and do several phone calls over a week with trigger words you agreed on and that you will use a couple of times (e.g. herpes, pregnancy, etc.).

jorvi• 9 years ago

Google owns 60-80% of these markets: smartphone, search, advertising, e-mail, video, browser, mapping. They don't need to own your desktop OS.

This is also why I always tell people Apple vs Google is a silly comparison. Apple might have a bigger market cap and make more money (currently), but Google largely owns nearly every important market. They're set up to take the deep learning market as well, and if Waymo pans out they're also the first to level 5 autonomous cars.

Hell, during the Obama era, Google had on average 1 White House meeting a week (!). That's influence no market cap can buy.

Funny thing is that I'm typing this on my Macbook Pro with my iPhone next to it. Apple is a sublime hardware company that also takes great care in crafting the most human software experience, but we're going to a 'The Expanse' future where every screen is just a dumb pipe to the cloud and the software on that cloud is just a dumb pipe to your personal AI and massive data trove. Apple is ill-suited for such a world, yet Google would thrive in it.

jk4930• 9 years ago

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

s3r3nity• 9 years ago

Hell, during the Obama era, Google had on average 1 White House meeting a week (!).

I had no idea about this - does anyone have citations on what the meetings were about? Were they just typical lobbying efforts?

victorhooi• 9 years ago

Are you sure the two are actually related?

AFAIK, Google doesn't mine phone calls, and I'm not aware of any companies that do. Even thinking about it from a technical point of view, it seems quite unlikely.

javajosh3• 9 years ago

Anyone know why they are building in C as opposed to a newer language like Rust or Go? I mean, if you're going to start from scratch, might as well go all the way, right?

sunstone• 9 years ago

They have an AI now that guarantees no subtle flaws in the C code.

bitcoinmoney• 9 years ago

C is still the king in performance I believe. Linux still has assembly code apart from C for those crucial performant sections.

Remember if you are talking at the HW-level you don't have the luxury of libraries and I doubt Go/Rust would be of any help unless you build the ecosystem for it. Something like the implementation of coreutil binaries can benefit from Go/Rust but not the OS-code itself.

steveklabnik4• 9 years ago

If Rust is significantly slower than C, it's a bug.

simula67• 9 years ago

I think Go has mandatory garbage collection. I think you can turn it off, but you can't manually manage memory.

Manually managing memory is important when you are writing real-time software like operating systems. You don't want the garbage collector to kick in without being asked when you trying to complete a task within a deadline

lukevers• 9 years ago

You could manually manage memory in Go if you want. Here's a few links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9545873

https://github.com/teh-cmc/mmm

d2kx• 9 years ago

They are actually using lots of Rust within Fuchsia/Magenta now and have been for months.

javajosh3• 9 years ago

I poked around and didn't see any Rust code, and the github stats say

    C 49.0%	 C++ 45.4%	 Makefile 2.9%	 Assembly 1.1%	 Shell 0.8%	 Objective-C 0.4%

https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/magenta

CardenB• 9 years ago

Probably because Google's C++ tooling is top notch and their developers are all proficient already.

spodek• 9 years ago

Unix got its start as a volunteer project with no organizational recognition from Bell Labs, and Linus Torvalds started working on Linux as a hobby.

I'm not Richard Stallman, but I consider it worth mentioning the middle steps of GNU and the GPL that gave the hobby a useful endpoint.

ekianjo2• 9 years ago

Linus only worked on the kernel, the coreutils from GNU were developed way, way earlier. Of course one cannot go without the other, but RMS and the folks behind GNU certainly deserve to be mentioned. Note that Linux had no clear license at the beginning and RMS influenced Linus to have it under GPL2 - that was the right decision at the time.

nialv7• 9 years ago

I thought Linus chose to use GPL2 himself?

Can you back your statement up?

swiley5• 9 years ago

Yeah all the other user facing system software Google has written ended up so well...

Chrome

Chrome OS

Android

remir2• 9 years ago

Not sure if you're being sarcastic. Chrome is the most populat browser, Chrome OS is highly successful in schools and Android has 2 billion active devices.

swiley5• 9 years ago

Windows is the most popular desktop OS, therefore it is the best.

Android is awful, people tolerate it but I doubt anyone is particularly fond of it. They just have the choice between that and iOS.

tradersam• 9 years ago

Chrome is by far the most popular browser by market share[1][2], and Android is the most prevalent OS in the entire world[3][4], so... not really sure what you're getting at here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268299/most-popular-inte...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

[4] http://thehackernews.com/2017/04/most-popular-operating-syst...

Raynak• 9 years ago

I'd do it to get rid of the fucking dependence on Java.

davemp• 9 years ago

Be careful what you wish for, the OS might end up with javascript.

rurban3• 9 years ago

Dart, no js.

d215• 9 years ago

Well, actually the fuchsia folks seem to take rust seriously...

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/magenta-rs/ https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/mxruntime/

px1999• 9 years ago

It sounds to me like an operation intended to employ some skilled engineers in order to keep them away from working on Google's competitors. I don't see a lot of outreach or organisational support, but maybe it is there and my cursory glance just hasn't turned any up.

It looks like they're doing the Google equivalent of Microsoft Research - which as far as I can tell revolves around hoping something cool comes of the projects, but mostly just trying to keep their competitors from getting top talent.

ghostly_s4• 9 years ago

That would be truly nefarious (which fits in perfectly with Google's M.O.). Do you know of any precedent for companies operating in this way? I guess the NSA probably operates on similar principles?

durgiston• 9 years ago

Why is this nefarious? Nothing is forcing these allegedly top employees from staying at Google. They get to work on something cool and get paid presumably a disgusting amount of money, and Google gets to maybe have a groundbreaking technology at the end of it, and their competitors don't get the allegedly top guys. If those employees would feel more fulfilled working somewhere else, and many do end up leaving, they can.

chauhankiran• 9 years ago

And it start with a simple program like this: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/init/+/d609758af8bb0b7c66d2...

Why Is Google Building a New Operating System from Scratch?

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