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Why Is Google Building a New Operating System from Scratch?
- blacksmith_tb 9y agoNeeds a [2016] doesn't it? Not that Fuschia isn't interesting...
- paulddraper 9y agoYeah. 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-smartphone-os-dumps-linux-has-a-wild-new-ui/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/googles-fuchsia-smar...
- bertazure 9y agoYeah! By the way, there is this mention of 3D world in Armadillo User Shell: https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/#/q/3d+world https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/#/q/3d+world Can you please try to elaborate on this?
- bertazure 9y agoYup, 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 https://twitter.com/chrismckillop/status/767479164785991680
- PhantomGremlin 9y agoAntagonistic headline. The article does a pretty good job of answering the question: Linux is bloated, isn't real time, and has IP issues.
- igravious 9y agoLinux 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.
- ahartmetz 9y agoIP 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.
- greglindahl 9y agoLinux "enterprise" distributions update things for a long time without requiring support from the hardware vendor. Google's familiar with this approach, I hear that they backported x86-64 to an earlier kernel for years.
- ahartmetz 9y agoIn the embedded case, usually only vendors have (or used to have, who knows if they use source control) the source code. As I said, you have no idea how bad it is unless you've had to work with that crap. Maybe have a look at "Bad" in this classic. https://www.dolphin-emu.org/blog/2013/09/26/dolphin-emulator-and-opengl-drivers-hall-fameshame/?cr=de https://www.dolphin-emu.org/blog/2013/09/26/dolphin-emulator... Edit: right, you can backport fixes and features while keeping the ABI stable. That is what Google seems to be doing with Android kernels to some degree.
- swiley 9y agoLinux being GPLed is probably the only reason it's used so often on all these different embeded platforms. No one is sharing code on these other oses unless you have piles of money but with Linux anyone can pretty much click "y" in menuconfig and you're good to go on nearly anything. The GPL has made Linux a "Universal Kernel" of sorts.
- largote 9y agoIMPACT
- matthberg 9y agoUm?
- 6d6b73 9y agoWhy? 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 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
- microwavecamera 9y agogOS#> 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 9y agogOS#> vi /home/jam/todo.txt Quota of ads clicked not reached for the time of day. gOS#>
- kalleboo 9y agogOS#> vim /home/jam/todo.txt This looks like a request from a bot! Please complete this CAPTCHA:
- mywittyname 9y ago[ ] I am not a robot
- CryoLogic 9y agoAs 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.
- microwavecamera 9y agoHoly 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.
- infogulch 9y agoWait, 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?
- infogulch 9y agoIt's stupid. The whole section could be rewritten as just: By using the Services, you allow us to use, disclose, and permit access to your Customer Proprietary Network Information or “CPNI” without your additional approval for any purpose permitted by federal law I just read it myself, that's essentially what it says. The whole privacy section is just garbage filler to distract you from that, unless I'm reading it completely wrong.
- 9y ago
- javajosh 9y agoAnyone 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 9y agoThey have an AI now that guarantees no subtle flaws in the C code.
- bitcoinmoney 9y agoC 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.
- steveklabnik 9y agoIf Rust is significantly slower than C, it's a bug.
- fooker 9y agoYeah, just one that will take a decade of compiler optimizations to solve. C and C++ didn't become what they are today overnight.
- steveklabnik 9y agoWe share an optimizer with clang thanks to LLVM; we get to take advantages of those decades already.
- fooker 9y agoClang and LLVM have evolved together for a while. It is pretty difficult to get similar results with other LLVM frontends. You don't have to believe me, just write a reasonably complicated algorithm (say.. a naive SAT solver) with both C++ and Rust (or Swift or $NEW_LANG) and compare the speeds.
- spodek 9y 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.
- ekianjo 9y agoLinus 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 9y agoI thought Linus chose to use GPL2 himself? Can you back your statement up?
- ekianjo 9y ago> “I may not have seen the light,” writes Torvalds, reflecting on Stallman’s 1991 Polytechnic University speech and his subsequent decision to switch to the GPL. “But I guess something from his speech sunk in.” https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_as_in_Freedom_2.0/Chapter_09 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_as_in_Freedom_2.0/Chapte... I claimed RMS influenced Linus, but I did not mean he did it by talking to him personally.
- swiley 9y agoYeah all the other user facing system software Google has written ended up so well... Chrome Chrome OS Android
- remir 9y agoNot 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.
- swiley 9y 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.
- remir 9y agoI disagree. Android has some problems (updates being one of them) but lots of people love Android because of the ability to customize the OS the way they like, being able to change default apps, access to the file system, etc... As for Windows, I would say Win 10 is a great OS. Now, is it the best? I don't think in those terms. To me that's an OS that does its job well despite some UI inconsistencies, plus it's compatible with the apps I need.
- tradersam 9y agoChrome 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#Summary_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su... [2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/268299/most-popular-internet-browsers/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/268299/most-popular-inte... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Mobile_devices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... [4]: http://thehackernews.com/2017/04/most-popular-operating-system.html http://thehackernews.com/2017/04/most-popular-operating-syst...
- Raynak 9y agoI'd do it to get rid of the fucking dependence on Java.
- davemp 9y agoBe careful what you wish for, the OS might end up with javascript.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- px1999 9y agoIt 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_s 9y agoThat 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 9y agoWhy 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.
- ghostly_s 9y agoWhat the OP described is removing talented people from the labor pool and directing them towards efforts which have no expected application in the market. I'm not suggesting it's the individuals who choose this arrangement who are losing out, it's society at large.
- chauhankiran 9y agoAnd it start with a simple program like this: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/init/+/d609758af8bb0b7c66d21a458043ee7bb3487bfb/init.c https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/init/+/d609758af8bb0b7c66d2...