Fuchsia overview

https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts

by farmerbb • 6 years ago

287 223 6 years ago

fuchsia.dev

matchbok2• 6 years ago

Another Google project that will end up being abandoned. Flutter, Dart, messaging, etc.

They need to just fix Android.

clumsysmurf• 6 years ago

Maybe they will fix Android by replacing it with Fuchsia :P I think the problems with Android run so deep, it can't just be "fixed".

rob74• 6 years ago

No idea why you're being downvoted... I also think that would be one of the most obvious areas where Google could eventually put Fuchsia to use - it would have several advantages: a new OS with a more modern architecture (getting rid of the GPL-licensed Linux kernel, which Google probably sees as an advantage); the possibility to update the kernel independently of the drivers; getting rid of Java and its legal liabilities which Oracle could exploit in the future etc.

bsder• 6 years ago

Well, the touchstone is audio.

If Fuchsia manages to have audio performance like iOS, then they definitely rearchitected rather than just slapped lipstick on a different pig.

cryptoz2• 6 years ago

I have a strong feeling that Fuchsia will not be abandoned. I can't put my finger on it, but Google's approach and tone around Fuchsia feels really different from how they talked about / marketed Reader, or even Wave, or other things they shut down.

I'm an Android developer learning Flutter and Dart out of both curiosity and an gamble that it will likely be a faster-improving way to make cross-platform apps than other approaches (like Kotlin + Swift, or React Native, or the others)

1014044• 6 years ago

...or Google+

Oh, wait

a3n• 6 years ago

I can't put my finger on it, but Google's approach and tone around Fuchsia feels really different from how they talked about / marketed Reader, or even Wave, or other things they shut down.

Different marketers?

1123581321• 6 years ago

I agree Fuchsia should prevail. My reasoning is that, presuming it succeeds technically, it could only be killed politically if both Android and ChromeOS prevented Fuchsia from being used on first party devices. This seems unlikely.

Google projects that get killed are either retail products that gain insufficient traction (for Google) or expensive projects that stall for technical or logistical reasons.

stevehawk• 6 years ago

It’s the feeling that Google will be able to use it to implement more Apple-like iron fist control over hardware vendors and tie-ins that makes it seem more permanent.

falcor84• 6 years ago

Both Flutter and Dart had new preview releases just this month

rstat12• 6 years ago

I'd hardly consider projects (ie Flutter and Dart) that both had releases in the last week to be "abandoned".

kgraves• 6 years ago

Another Google project that will end up being abandoned.

Do you have any sort of evidence for this statement or is this pure speculation?

yjftsjthsd-h• 6 years ago

Google's track record is evidence, albeit not a guarantee.

diegoperini• 6 years ago

Your resentment (if there is any) is understandable but you are using a cross platform application framework to predict what Google will do for an OS. Moreover, I believe Flutter isn't going anywhere anytime soon either.

I write about Flutter in our company blog every now and then. I can confirm, Flutter posts currently receive their all time high impression counts and time retention rates.

plerpin5• 6 years ago

Ah, the HN hivemind Markov chain is mired in another infinite cycle.

https://hncynic.leod.org/

mathgladiator4• 6 years ago

This is just pure conjecture.

mathgladiator4• 6 years ago

It's a pretty big idea because it's pretty neat, but why not simply run an algorithm to figure out where the "random" random sequence is?

Then figure out which random sequence is a good fit for what's happening, as opposed to just looking for it in a random chain.

mathgladiator4• 6 years ago

For those of you who find the 'misconceptions' of the phrase 'Mobi', this makes me very glad you aren't just an old friend.

It really should be noted that this was published in 2005.

mathgladiator4• 6 years ago

That's great, my other three comments were generated from your comment. This is hilarious.

matchbok2• 6 years ago

Truth hurts.

myko• 6 years ago

Flutter is the UI framework of Fuchsia

rvz• 6 years ago

Well Flutter is a first-class citizen in Fuchsia and will be able to run Flutter apps as soon as they release the OS. So I don't see this as a likely candidate for Google to abandon this.

Android apps compatibility 'appears' to be being supported via a mix of using Android's ART ported to Fuchsia and hardware assisted virtualisation of the Linux kernel, called 'Machina'.

The sort of transitioning Apple did between PowerPC -> x86 and now to ARM.

brmgb• 6 years ago

Google makes a lot of its own infrastructure for its data centers. I would not be surprised if fuchsia was already in use there. It would make sense at least securitywise.

jimbob45• 6 years ago

Flutter/Dart aren't being abandoned. They're healthy.

Also Google needs to move away from the Java ecosystem thanks to Oracle v. Google. That means dumping Android, which was built on Java entirely. Creating a new OS based on their language would seem to be in their best interests.

squarefoot• 6 years ago

Another Google project that will end up being abandoned

This one however will give Google full control of the devices it runs on (no more Linux kernel related obligations), so they have zero incentives to kill it, unless they write something else that does the same things. Google will rather abandon Android a few years after Fuchsia is launched.

jpm_sd• 6 years ago

Sounds a bit like a modern, open approach to the problems that were solved by QNX. Excited to see how it evolves!

Animats• 6 years ago

Not really open. If you submit code, you grant a license to Google to use it in non-proprietary code.[1] So, at some point, once users and developers are locked in, Google can make later versions closed and proprietary enough to stop clones.

Like they did to Android with Google Play Services.

[1] https://cla.developers.google.com/about/google-individual

rstat12• 6 years ago

Google Play Services was never open. You can however still submit changes to the actual OS though.

People said the same thing about Android in its early days. It was wrong then, still wrong now, and will likely be just as wrong in the future.

1014044• 6 years ago

So basically you'd work for free for one of the wealthiest companies.

That's f'ed up.

wmf• 6 years ago

All permissively-licensed (MIT/BSD/Apache) code has that property. If you contribute to BSD anyone can create a proprietary derivative.

mbrukman7• 6 years ago

Disclosure: I work at Google (but not on Fuchsia), and I contribute quite a bit to open-source projects.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc.

I'm not sure what you mean by "you grant a license to Google to use it in non-proprietary code" — was that a typo and did you mean "proprietary"? In any case, Apache/BSD/MIT licensed code can already be used in proprietary code, the CLA does not change that.

The Google ICLA you cited [1] is basically the same as the ASF ICLA [2]; the gist is that you retain copyright of your contributions, you're not giving up your copyright — i.e., it's a copyright license, not a copyright assignment (as some other CLAs are).

And, naturally, anyone can fork it if they wish, or distribute proprietary, non-open-source versions of an Apache/BSD/MIT-licensed project, subject to appropriate attributions, if required, by the relevant licenses.

However, neither you (nor Google) can claim copyright over the entire project, because the copyrights are held by the relevant contributors. Changing the license for the entire project requires agreement from all copyright holders — for example, see what LLVM had to do when they chose to add a clause to their license [3].

[1] https://cla.developers.google.com/about/google-individual

[2] https://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.pdf

[3] https://llvm.org/foundation/relicensing/

magicalist• 6 years ago

Not really open

Not many people still consider non-copyleft open source licenses not "open" (even the FSF disagrees on the need for copyleft to be considered libre) and MIT, BSD, and Apache 2.0 in particular are widely considered proper open source, so I think you just mean "Not really copyleft", which, sure.

on_and_off• 6 years ago

agree on the issue but I don't think that Play Services is a great exemple.

It has always been closed source and can be replaced in any AOSP build. Google has no obligation to provide open sources apps and services on top of AOSP.

CyberDildonics• 6 years ago

Lets hope. I think QNX programs were often made out of smaller processes. It would be interesting and cool if this is the case with Fuchia.

gman83• 6 years ago

Sounds like Google's version of Darwin.

plerpin5• 6 years ago

You mean Mach?

heavyset_go• 6 years ago

Fuchsia is more than a kernel, and I wouldn't describe XNU as just being Mach.

Godel_unicode• 6 years ago

Please see the below diagram from Wikipedia explaining the difference between Mach and Darwin. I agree with OP that Fuschia is much closer to Darwin than Mach.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Mac_OS_X_arc...

catern• 6 years ago

Fuchsia aims to provide drivers with a binary-stable interface. In the future, drivers compiled for one version of Fuchsia will continue to work in future versions of Fuchsia without needing to be modified or even recompiled. This approach means that Fuchsia devices will be able to update to newer versions of Fuchsia seamlessly while keeping their existing drivers.

This is a massive step back for open source. The fact that Linux doesn't have a binary-compatible driver interface is a good thing: It means hardware vendors have a very strong incentive to get their drivers upstream into the kernel. And indeed, on servers and laptops and desktop machines, this has largely happened. But on mobile platforms, with Android, it has not happened. For various reasons, but nothing fundamental.

We would all benefit if Android hardware drivers were upstreamed. This would allow for a much more competitive, and higher quality, software and hardware ecosystem on mobile platforms.

But Fuschia is going in the exact opposite direction: It makes it possible to build proprietary drivers. It's for this reason that I hope Fuschia is not successful. We already have a high quality kernel: Linux. If Fuschia is "not a science experiment", but instead intended to use proven ideas, then any improvement that could be added to Fuschia could be added to Linux. We don't need a new operating system whose only advantage is that it's easier to write proprietary drivers.

ptomato• 6 years ago

For various reasons, but nothing fundamental.

"Hardware vendors being unwilling to make the drivers they write open source" is a pretty fundamental reason.

Which is worse, a phone where you can't update kernel because of the closed drivers or a phone where you can update the kernel, with closed drivers? I don't think that realistically there's a third option. The open source community is not, for example, going to make their own high performance gpus.

snazz3• 6 years ago

Plus, better isolation between driver code and other kernel code (which Fuchsia seems to bring; correct me if I'm wrong) would be good for everyone, since you can be relatively assured that running vendor-provided driver blobs is safe.

cycloptic2• 6 years ago

I would not say that is a fundamental reason. They have been willing to do it when the proper incentives are there. The incentive to keeping it closed source is primarily part of a strategy to sabotage their competitors, which I hope is not a behavior that anyone here is complicit in. Please don't work for hardware companies that do this, there are plenty of companies out there that know how to spend their money in other ways.

Which is worse, a phone where you can't update kernel because of the closed drivers or a phone where you can update the kernel, with closed drivers?

Neither of those are good options because even in the second case, there are still vast swaths of code that upstream is not going to touch out of fear of breaking things, the end result being that you still get stuck with unfixable kernel and driver bugs.

The open source community is not, for example, going to make their own high performance gpus.

The open source community includes a lot of companies. The high-performance GPU companies are welcome to join this community any time they like.

lain-dono• 6 years ago

The open source community is not, for example, going to make their own high performance gpus.

I think we should lower the entry threshold first. The open source and free GPU project was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw http://llhd.io/. After all, one of the main problems with OpenHardware projects is the closed FPGA ecosystem.

NOGDP4• 6 years ago

The open source community is not, for example, going to make their own high performance gpus.

Of course it will.

naasking• 6 years ago

Which is worse, a phone where you can't update kernel because of the closed drivers or a phone where you can update the kernel, with closed drivers? I don't think that realistically there's a third option

A phone in which the kernel never needs to be updated, like with the seL4 microkernel.

CJefferson• 6 years ago

While I understand why you want open source drivers, the situation hasnt improved for 10 years, and this is one of the major reasons many phones end up not getting Android updates, which makes Google/Android look bad.

est31• 6 years ago

the situation hasnt improved for 10 years

But it has.

* I remember having major issues with printer drivers on Linux 10 years ago. Nowadays thanks to IPP support I don't need any drivers any more. I had to help my dad with installing a windows driver while on my Linux laptop it just worked.

* My Laptop from 13 years ago didn't have free network drivers. I had to jump through hoops to install them. Now they are all free.

* AMD has started maintaining really good open source driver support for their GPUs

* Even for Android there is improvement, with e.g. free Mali drivers being built. It's slow and not enough, but improvement.

bgorman• 6 years ago

I believe the situation is a bit better now that there are LTS releases of the Linux kernel.

damnyou• 6 years ago

A big reason why Fuchsia exists is governance — Google wants to make a kernel that it controls. Linux cannot provide that advantage unless Google forks it.

ReactiveJelly• 6 years ago

It's a negotiation, and the hardware vendors seem to be 100% happy stepping away from the table and letting old hardware suffer.

They have a lot more leverage than we FOSS supporters do.

AnthonyMouse2• 6 years ago

What this is really about is Qualcomm. They have inadequate competition and that allows them to abuse everybody else.

In a competitive market, open source drivers win. Look at the desktop market -- nearly everything is open source, and the biggest holdout is nVidia, because for a while there nobody was challenging them on performance. Now that AMD has competitive GPUs again, not only does that provide a competitive option with open source drivers, nVidia is now losing market share to them.

OEMs don't really like proprietary drivers. They're a pain. Whenever new driver versions come out, it becomes the OEM's problem to test and distribute them instead of having the Linux kernel team deal with that hassle. The open source drivers also generally have fewer bugs (because anybody can fix them), which leads to fewer support calls and more satisfied customers who make repeat purchases.

And customers naturally prefer hardware with longer hardware support, when it's available.

What we need is more competition for Qualcomm. Google could do that if they wanted to -- throw some money at making competing phone chips. Apple does it, why can't they? And then publish open source drivers and sell the chips to anybody.

We also have AMD as a dark horse now. The Ryzen 4000 series goes down to 10 watts -- it's so power efficient you could squeeze it into an Android tablet as-is (and then be a lot faster than most tablets), and it wouldn't take much on AMD's part to do something that could work in a phone. Android is an open source system with apps that run on the JVM, so the architectural difference shouldn't matter much.

Or we could get the antitrust authorities to stop letting Qualcomm buy every competitor that springs up, which they've been doing for years.

But you solve the competition problem and you get open source drivers. Along with all the other benefits of real competition.

netdur• 6 years ago

sorry but that's just naive idealism, my wife has android flagship, a Samsung s10, she will receive one more year of updates, then she will be on her own, my daughter has iPhone 6S, this old device will receive iOS 14 soon.

my wife do not care about updates, she will not hesitate a second to get iPhone once she knows her social media or pictures is not safe on her android device, this is the issue Android have and Fuchsia have to fix.

plerpin5• 6 years ago

I'm pretty sure Qualcomm not giving a shit about supporting their SoC is why my Android watches were practically EOL'd within months.

StreamBright2• 6 years ago

Exactly. It is kind of funny how IT people look through their tech glass and think that the rest of the world (99.9999%) does the same. Nobody cares about software, everybody cares about user experience. Linux proved the point that having unstable driver interface has nothing to do with the success of the platform.

Leherenn• 6 years ago

Note that it will only get one more major Android version, but Samsung provides 4 years of security updates, so she still has 3 more years before she's on her own.

Certainly not as good as Apple, but I believe that's the best you can find in Android land.

uluyol• 6 years ago

Once upon a time, Linux had terrible support for laptop hardware. Remember ndiswrapper? That thing you used to get Windows wifi drivers working on Linux. Or how about when ATI (AMD) provided only the most buggy drivers. How about printers?

These days Linux has better hardware support (imo) than Windows. Solving it for laptops was about creating the right incentives for hardware manufacturers. It can happen for mobile too.

zaat2• 6 years ago

I wouldn't say Linux has better hardware support than Windows. When your hardware is properly recognized and supported by Linux than yeah, I do feel it operates much better, more stable and have more knobs. However, not all hardware works at all.

For example, as of now, the hardware sensors on my x590 board are not recognized.

LED control is not a thing, even on most old/established boards (you can argue if LEDs are nice or ugly, but if they are there I want to control them).

Even enterpriseish devices, like Lenovo's X1 laptops, that are CERTIFIED by both Red Hat and Ubuntu, have limited hardware support at best. Fingerprint scanners on 3 year old models are still not recognized, and there seems to be zero will from synaptic to ever support it. Sleep states were terrible for a long long time, finally fixed in a fashion that requires different firmware for optimal sleep performance on Windows or another one for Linux.

So no, my experience is that still hardware vendors are not giving me as a Linux user the support and value for the good money I pay for their products. Obviously they don't deliver the expected level of support any reasonable consumer would expect, and most probably won't deliver it in the future either, since they get away with it so easily.

cameronbrown• 6 years ago

I really want to agree with you, and in principle, it would be far better for hardware manufacturers to upstream their drivers. In practice this hasn't happened and will never happen, because there's no incentive to support hardware no longer making money (a chip is only sold once, after all).

I think the mounting cost of e-waste is a far bigger deal. Think of the unimaginable amount of carbon impact from the millions of trashed Android phones out there. Do we really want to continue down this path, until there's billions of obsolete machines sitting in landfills (there probably already is)? Updatability can save devices for much longer, and now people are upgrading less often, there's a huge opportunity for impact there.

Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on the Android OS or Fuchsia.

dahfizz• 6 years ago

Updatability can save devices for much longer

I'm skeptical of this. People buy new phones because they are faster, or because they did update and the new version of the OS is very slow on old hardware. People buy new hardware because they want new hardware.

Most non-tech people I know actively avoid updating their phones because it's annoying. They will ignore the notifications and choose older software over the inconvenience of updating and rebooting their phone.

VikingCoder9• 6 years ago

I think your take on this is very wrong.

An open source driver written once will work for all future versions of Fuschia. Right? That reduces the effort for open source developers enormously.

Most security flaws come in above the driver level. Right? Being able to update the OS, despite the hardware manufacturer's laziness, is a huge boon for everyone.

Fuschia is open source. Drivers written for one Fuschia (say, the one Google controls) should work for another Fuschia (say, the one you and your friend forked.) Right? That's a huge win for you.

Whatever incentives you have imagined that hardware manufacturers have, time has proven those incentives don't work. It's far better to take as much control away from them as possible. They will do the minimum amount of work necessary (write new drivers). Then we can all exploit the hardware + driver + Fuschia system.

It has always, and will always, be possible to build propriety drivers. This is minimizing the blast radius of them never being updated, as much as possible.

For these reasons and more, we should all hope Fuschia is successful.

The Android developers who have tried to live on top of Linux are sick of the problems that Linux brings them. Fuschia is an open source direct response to those limitations. It's stunning to me that you would wish them to fail.

"then any improvement that could be added to Fuschia could be added to Linux". Explain to me why we still have BSD? Not all problems are solved by Linux. The sooner you accept that, the better off we will all be.

It's like you're wishing Clang would die, because we can always just improve GCC. That's demonstrably false. Just like saying everything good in Fuschia can be added to Linux. No, it can't.

"We don't need a new operating system whose only advantage is that it's easier to write proprietary drivers."

Wait, if it's easier to write propriety drivers, doesn't that lower the barrier to making low-cost phones? Well, Christ, sign me up. Do you have any idea how many billion people have a low-cost smart phone as their first computing device? If we lower the cost even more, that will broaden the reach even more.

Do you seriously not get that the other major phone OS is completely closed source? Maybe put a little faith in the people who have developed the most successful competing operating system that's open source?

josephcsible3• 6 years ago

An open source driver

Lost you already. Since Fuchsia uses a pushover license instead of a copyleft license, the vendors' drivers aren't going to be open source. Look how many companies today don't open-source their Linux drivers, and they're breaking the law by not doing so. It's going to be so much worse when there's "nothing" wrong with keeping them proprietary.

nmcain4• 6 years ago

As a developer of a Fuchsia fork, I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, not all components are opensource ATM, (like the khadas VIM2 bootloader), but at least they are available.

sanxiyn• 6 years ago

We already have a high quality kernel: Linux.

Linux is full of security bugs. It is ludicrous to suggest Linux is high quality. OpenBSD, maybe. Not Linux.

gregkh• 6 years ago

Citation needed :)

Seriously, all software has bugs, how do you judge the quality of an operating system that is not finished?

thayne• 6 years ago

I'm torn on the subject of a binary-stable driver interface. The idealist in me likes that it forces vendors to open source their driver code, but the pragmatist in me knows that some vendors (like a certain graphics card manufacturer in the desktop and server world) probably never will open source their drivers, and if they do, they may not be as high of quality as the proprietary version for other OSes. I wonder if there is some middle ground. Also, even with open source drivers, the lack of stability has downsides, such as requiring you to recompile all drivers whenever the kernel updates. Maybe where a subset of the ABI is stable, so it's possible to build driver binaries that work across kernel versions, but there is still some incentive for keeping drivers open source?

any improvement that could be added to Fuschia could be added to Linux

This is not necessarily true. Some things certainly. But linux is constrained by keeping a backwards compatible user-space interface, and being mostly posix-compliant. For example, fuchsia doesn't have fork or exec (it has a single spawn function/syscall instead). Linux could add a new spawn syscall, but has to keep fork, clone, execv, etc. forever. And even if most new code moves to use the new syscall, the complexity around the old ones will be around forever.

combatentropy• 6 years ago

any improvement that could be added to Fuschia could be added to Linux

Not easily. If Linux has gone down a path far enough, it may be hard to reverse, especially if it is of fundamental design. For example, the separation of kernel space and user space is different. I am not an operating system engineer, but I would bet that certain things would be hard to change --- deep structural decisions mentioned in the article, like:

- the kernel primitives are exposed to applications as object-capabilities

- applications can interact only with the objects to which they have been granted access explicitly

- applications interact with each other and the system using message passing

use proven ideas

I would say in the realm of software there are still competing ideas, even if you narrow it to the subset of ideas that are good (secure, maintainable, fast, etc.). Linux chose some good ideas, but if you want to try out different ones, you may have to start from a clean slate.

goodthenandnow5• 6 years ago

There is also de fact that the concepts/model of Zircon's kernel API and Linux one are diferent and in some cases mutually incosistent if implemented in the same kernel

kbumsik• 6 years ago

It makes it possible to build proprietary drivers.

Even worse, Fuchsia aims to be BSD License, not GPL. Fuchsia is a complete disaster for hobby OS makers.

pjmlp12• 6 years ago

Apparently everyone is unhappy with GPL.

In a couple of years the same people will understand why it exists in first place.

I guess they are having fun running FreeBSD on their PS4s, thanks to Sony, hence why they aren't paying attention.

StreamBright2• 6 years ago

I would say this is one of their biggest advantage over Linux.

> This would allow for a much more competitive, and higher quality, software, and hardware ecosystem on mobile platforms.

I have no idea why you think that. Any proof? How would you measure it?

> It makes it possible to build proprietary drivers

End users do not care about opensource vs closed source, they care about the user experience. Based on your thesis, Linux would be the best operating system with the most market share out there because it features everything you say, yet it has a negligible share on desktop. Empirically proving your thesis being wrong.

pjmlp12• 6 years ago

Everyone is having their go at this, blame younger generations for fighting GPL, while favouring other license models.

GPL is the only reason Linux still exits, not for long though, when even Linux Foundation has decided to go with something else for IoT, namely Zephyr, which is neither Linux based, nor under GPL license.

In about 20 years we will be back at shareware and public domain, enjoy what is left while it lasts.

It doesn't matter if Fucschia is a success, Android is already like this, since Project Treble, Linux drivers are "legacy" drivers on Android, all new drivers use a microkernel approach with Android IPC, basically how Fuschia drivers work.

ahartmetz2• 6 years ago

The Linux Foundation has a misleading name: it's essentially the Megacorporations Linux User Group. It wants whatever its member companies want. It does not really want to promote Linux or, say, enforce the GPL.

fluffy872• 6 years ago

This has only happened on Linux for commodity hardware. But Nvidia and others (hpc interconnects, routers,...) usually ship their own proprietary drivers, or even Linux forks.

rwmj• 6 years ago

I guess that Linux will quickly get an "NDISwrapper" equivalent that can run Fuchsia binary blobs. We'll all be a little bit worse off as a result, but with mostly working peripherals.

BiteCode_dev2• 6 years ago

I'm a strong FOSS proponent, most of my software is released under MIT, I use Linux daily and help others to use open source as much as I can.

And yet I find this idea total BS.

The reason I could even migrate to Linux when I was a teen was compatibility. It's because free softwares (VLC, Firefox, OOo...) were ported to Windows, a proprietary plateform, so that I could then feel at home later on Linux. And I made a definitive switch thanks to Ubuntu, because it made using most hardware easy, by accepting to use proprietary drivers when required.

Strong arming the industry into Libre never worked. The GPL is one of the least popular licences for this very reason. I, myself, never uses it.

Representing close source as evil doesn't work either.

It's like being vegetarian (which I am) and guilt triping people about meat. It's completly counter productive.

The result we got is that the year of Linux on the desktop never happened, because playing on Linux is hard, because the last cool gadget doesn't work, because you have to carefully chose your laptop to be sure it will work with it (E.G: my XPS 2-in-1 webcam doesn't work on Linux).

It also adds a lot of work to the kernel devs to try to keep up with the outter world, but they have a limited bandwith.

So Linux BT still sucks (even more than regular BT). Wifi is still not on part with the XP on other OS. Batter life is abysmal (I'm dual booting, and the difference is X2).

All for an ideal we never reached anyway.

Help and encouraging for FOSS makes a better world.

Being pushy about it hurts us.

ryukafalz2• 6 years ago

I disagree. For starters, strong arming the industry has worked in a number of cases; this has been covered in a few other comment threads so I won't retread them too much here, but the state of free drivers on Linux is significantly better than it was just a few years ago.

More broadly though: what kind of world do you want to live in? A world where it's easy for companies to create new proprietary software, or a world where it's easy for the users to shape their computing experience?

Look around you, at the consumer devices you own. Can you name one that's: 1) aimed at consumers (i.e. not a dev board, Raspberry Pis and such don't count here) and 2) that you have most or all of the source code to?

Look, if your goal is just "make better software" in general, maybe permissive open source has been a success. But if your goal is to increase practical user freedom, it's been an abject failure. It's just helped companies to make proprietary software more cheaply. And sure, there's some interesting technology that comes out of that for developers, but in the vast majority of cases the users don't see the benefits! Surveillance capitalism marches on, bolstered by the free labor of the community.

This is why I've been so disheartened that parts of the community have turned so anti-copyleft recently. In a world of permissively licensed software, the incentives are stacked against free software for end users. In a world of GPL'd software, you can release your code as GPL too, or you can pay more to write it all yourself.

_ph_2• 6 years ago

The fact that Linux doesn't have a binary-compatible driver interface is a good thing: It means hardware vendors have a very strong incentive to get their drivers upstream into the kernel.

I think it is a horrible thing and a reason to deter hardware vendors from supporting Linux at all. Even with the best intentions and open source drivers, it adds maintenance burdons to the hardware manufacturers. And some hardware vendors cannot go open source at all, as they might have licensed other code to implement their drivers or have other valid concerns not to open up their drivers entirely, like for IP protection.

tbodt• 6 years ago

*Fuchsia

dang2• 6 years ago

Please don't editorialize titles. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Lots of explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

(Submitted title was 'Fuchsia overview – “Fuchsia is not a science experiment”')

phreack• 6 years ago

I'm sorry if this isn't the place to ask (and please let me know), but how should we correctly title something like a tweet, that has no obvious title?

dang2• 6 years ago

I'd use the text of the tweet or the most representative substring of it that will fit the 80 char limit.

tarkin2• 6 years ago

I have mixed feelings. This brings invitation to the operating system world. But it will track user behaviour from its core.

jccalhoun• 6 years ago

Fuchsia's goal is to power production devices and products used for business-critical applications

People have guessed that Fuchsia is some successor to Android or unification of Chrome OS and Android. However, this statement makes me wonder if it is meant to run their backend hardware and not consumer products.

qmarchi• 6 years ago

Actually quite the opposite, Fuchsia already runs on production devices manufactured by Google. The (ridiculously long named) Google Nest Home Hub and Home Hub Max both can run Zircon and Fuchsia on device, although it's very much for development.

innagadadavida• 6 years ago

Apart from the unfortunate sounding name, for this to be relevant on android phones or watches, it needs to simply work with the 2+ million apps out there. Just posix compatibility is insufficient - apps rely on Linux implementation behavior.

jeffbee• 6 years ago

They probably cut it down from the original “Play Home Hub All Access by Nest by Google”.

skavi• 6 years ago

There’s a fairly heavy emphasis on graphics and UI throughout Fuchsia’s stack, so I doubt it’s meant to just sit on a server.

dzonga• 6 years ago

everything in userspace == high security. programs, software won't clash like they do on *nix, windows due to isolation. same benefits of snaps | flatpaks. but now you've a microkernel which is 1. fast 2. easy to patch 3. stable ABI something Linux doesn't have.

michaelmrose10• 6 years ago

In what way does software "clash" on *nix? The isolation provided by snaps and flatpaks is 99% about isolating devs from having to worry about deps and different platforms.

lsofzz• 6 years ago

flatpak/snap applications can run on its own confined sanboxes

killjoywashere• 6 years ago

Has anyone tried installing this on a ThinkPad? Like an X201 or X230?

butterisgood• 6 years ago

I really like Fuchsia design wise... it’s got a great build system and folks on IRC have been nothing but friendly and excellent! Travis and team are doing a great job!

cletus• 6 years ago

I can't help but think that if microkernel architectures were such a good idea, that would explain why every popular OS is a microkernel architecture (oh wait...). Snark aside, this is a serious debate since the inception of Linux [1].

It's important to look at Fuchsia through the lens of what problems it solves in Android/Linux because that tells you a lot.

As we know, receiving updates in Android is, well, a clusterfark. There are two key problems:

1. Phone manufacturers need to write or update drivers essentially with each Android release; and

2. Those drivers are by nature of Linux being a monolithic kernel, written in kernel space. Kernel space code by third-parties is going to be inherently more unstable to your device than if they were written in user space.

So when Google talks about Fuchsia having a stable binary ABI for drivers, they're talking about solving both of these problems (at least as they see them).

So the question I've always had about the justifications for pouring billions of dollars into Fuchsia (I mean that quite literally) is: could this really not have been solved in Linux, even if it's just the limited context of Android?

I'm not a driver or Linux expert by any stretch of the imagination. I'm sure there are people here who are so this is my question to you: could you have created a system for ideally user space drivers with a stable ABI in Linux and avoided all the costs of completely reinventing that wheel?

My other question about Fuchsia is: does Google foresee themselves adopting the same vertically integrated solution that, say, Apple does? It's worth noting that Apple by not providing iOS to third parties is somewhat paradoxically immune to antitrust investigations (I mean really... how does that work?).

Evidence against Google adopting the Apple model is the fact that Fuchsia is open source, which is a curious decision. This seems to imply that Google either wants to maintain an Android-like ecosystem or they simply see it as their only viable option.

I don't know how anyone can expect that Samsung is going to move to Fuchsia. Samsung already chafes under the yoke of their Google dependence with Android. They've tried to get out from under it (ie Tizen) but luckily for Google, Samsung is terrible at software (at anyone with Samsung crapware on their Galaxy can attest; Bixby anyone?).

Maybe Google thinks the insurance of Fuchsia being open source is necessary for third-party adoption to have any chance but still, the only way I see Samsung going along with this is that there's absolutely no other alternative.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...

cageface• 6 years ago

Samsung is getting better at software. OneUI gets very positive reviews. Many of the Samsung apps on my Note 10 are perfectly acceptable daily tools. Mail, gallery, notes etc are competitive now.

pjmlp12• 6 years ago

Android Linux also has it since Project Treble.

Linux drivers are considered legacy on Android, all new drivers should follow the Project Treble architecture, which is basically the genesis of how Fuchsia drivers work.

Every driver has their own process and uses Android IPC to talk with the kernel.

The stable ABI is Android HIDL, similar to Fuchsia FIDL, a protocol buffer based IPC for fast communication with the kernel, that also allows for passing references to hardware buffers across processes.

You can read all about it at AOSP web site.

legulere• 6 years ago

Operating systems have a lot of inertia. Linux is close to 30 years old. Performance characteristics, threat models and a lot of other things were different back then. New operating systems solving this issue will generally fail because of missing drivers and userland code, not because they are technologically worse.

TulliusCicero2• 6 years ago

Did you read the article?

One of the things it explicitly calls out is that Fuchsia is not a microkernel.

dilandau• 6 years ago

Given Google's penchant for abruptly canceling platforms, I hope that implementors and vendors will be careful with this.

cobookman2• 6 years ago

to be fair, there's a large graveyard of OSs which failed to gain traction, especially on mobile.

I'd be surprised if any vendor adopts Fuchsia thinking it has anything better than a 10-20% chance of being mainstream.

Today we have Android and iOS as the dominant Mobile phone OSs. Don't forget about all the attempts to dethrone those two by: Symbian, WebOS, Windows phone, Blackberry, Tizen, Ubuntu Touch, kaios, firefox os, PureOS, LiteOS,...etc.

loeg• 6 years ago

Fuchsia's goal is to power production devices and products used for business-critical applications. As such, Fuchsia is not a playground for experimental operating system concepts. Instead, the platform roadmap is driven by practical use cases arising from partner and product needs.

This is an interesting statement given how many relatively unpopular OS concepts it integrates. I am interested in seeing this succeed. I hope that Fuschia helps drive capability-based sandboxing of end-user software.

goodthenandnow5• 6 years ago

Yes. That is what we as users most need.

Application sandboxing from first principles and the very bottom

sam1r• 6 years ago

What is the cheapest fuschsia supported hardware device?

michaelmrose10• 6 years ago

Logically an emulator https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/getting_started#set_up_the_e...

Regarding supported platforms

"Fuchsia has good support for a few different hardware platforms including the Acer Switch 12, Intel NUC, and Google Pixelbook (not to be confused with the Chromebook Pixel). The install process is not currently compatible with ARM-based targets."

Looks like the 2 laptops can be had used/new for between 660-1k+ while the NUC can be purchased as a bare board with cpu for as little as 290

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits...

drtse4• 6 years ago

Haven't checked Fuchsia in a while, very glad to see that they have extended the documentation.

Did they improve the initial steps to get up and running too?

(I remember it took hours to clone all the subprojects and most of the times something failed along the way, even worse than downloading the Android sources)

stewbrew3• 6 years ago

I still think its strange to create an OS that officially supports only 2-3 languages for development. Sounds rather 1980s to me.

thethimble• 6 years ago

To the extent that there's native C++ I'm sure it will be somewhat straightforward to get other languages supported later by users/developers.

TulliusCicero2• 6 years ago

2-3 languages? It has support for C, C++, Dart, Rust, and Go. And I think some level of support for Swift.

stewbrew3• 6 years ago

I wouldn't be so sure about Go. Anway, I found certain remarks somewhat irritating in this respect. I'm happy if it turns out I misunderstood something.

Jyaif• 6 years ago

It would be strange to create such an OS, which is why that's not the case of Fuchsia:

"Fuchsia is designed to let developers bring their own runtime, which means a developer can use a variety of languages or runtimes without needing to change Fuchsia itself"

pjmlp12• 6 years ago

Sounds very much like any Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sony, Nintendo, pick your embedded OEM, ... to me.

UNIX has always been the snowflake, and even there, commercial UNIX SKDs are pretty much C, C++ and Fortran, followed by the usual POSIX scripting languages.

To create a good developer experience in OS SDK IDE and platform APIs, there are only so much one can support.

Unless we are doing UNIX ABIs and the best one can hope for are 70's C style bindings.

axegon_2• 6 years ago

I've been eyeing Fuchsia for some time now and wanting to give it a spin but I've been holding back just to make sure it doesn't get abandoned(despite having a well maintained fork already). Real shame they pulled the plug on the raspberry pi support.

nmcain4• 6 years ago

What fork are you referring to?

axegon_2• 6 years ago

DahliaOS.

tempodox2• 6 years ago

I was trying to find out from that site who's behind this and if that information is in there it must be really well hidden. Apart from other concerns, I'm not going to touch an OS from a group that doesn't clearly state who they are.

SSLy3• 6 years ago

It's GOOG's GPL-less replacement for the Linux kernel, made so they can control the phones even more.

tempodox2• 6 years ago

Now I understand why much of the language in there looks more like foggy marketing hype than a comprehensible explanation.

oseityphelysiol2• 6 years ago

Do you actually believe a company such as Google would constrain themselves with GPL (which is pretty much _socialism_) on a product that will possibly bring hundreds of billions in revenue?

nmcain4• 6 years ago

fuchsia.dev?

jokoon• 6 years ago

It's been 4 years and it's still being developed? Apparently android v1/v2 was released about 1 year later after the first iPhone.

It doesn't seem so easy to make a new OS/kernel.

The linux kernel is not perfect, but at least it works well, it's mature, and developers know how to work on it.

oseityphelysiol2• 6 years ago

It's been 4 years and it's still being developed? Apparently android v1/v2 was released about 1 year later after the first iPhone.

I'd say they learned a lot from Android, the use cases and problems arising from supporting such a giant project on so many different devices (and non cooperating vendors). So it's not a surprise they're taking their time. I imagine there must have been a long and in-depth analysis at Google of Android and other operating systems before Fuchsia came to be, considering the money they're going to spending on it.

AFAIK Android was a quick hack and the ecosystem, if you know anything about it, you know it's a mess.

goodthenandnow5• 6 years ago

Yep.

It's not always that appears a new software that is very well thought out and designed. In general things are hacked together and made in somewhat a hurry and it ends up causing a lot of problems afterwards.

It's also not everyone, meaning companies in practice, that could aford time to analyse, design, test and iterate such a software like an operating system and all its needed subsystems for the modern needs...

Fuchsia overview

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