6 ms·

I wonder why they are using a VM running Debian for Linux applications, as Chrome OS is already Linux (Gentoo) based itself.

bergie 8y ago
Sandboxing
rukittenme 8y ago
If I had to guess its because they want to move to their own proprietary systems and don't want to support backwards compatibility with "native" linux applications.
- derefr 8y ago
  Exactly–ChromeOS being Linux-based is, at this point, an implementation detail. No ChromeOS "apps" depend on that fact, because they all run under their own VMs or ABI sandboxes. This means that Google could make a Fuchsia-based ChromeOS and nothing in userland (save for the code of those VMs and sandboxes) would have to change.
  - hutzlibu 8y ago
    Isn't Fuchsia OS as well, kust no GPL?
    - esprehn 8y ago
      Fuschia doesn't contain any Linux at all, hidden or otherwise. There's a compat layer you can run on top, but it's closer to the Windows subsystem for Linux than Chrome OS.
    - vatueil 8y ago
      Yes, various parts use BSD/MIT/Apache licenses, e.g.: https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/docs/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/docs/blob/master/LICENSE That said, parent comments seem to be talking about two different topics. Later comment about Google switching the underlying foundation of Chrome OS from Linux to Fuchsia sounds plausible, while earlier comment complaining about Fuchsia being proprietary is nonsense.
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        It might not be proprietary, but if OEMs already only release updates at gun point with GPL, just wait until they get an OS with MIT like licenses given to them. It will be a big party.
        hutzlibu 8y ago
        Still does not make Fuchsia proprietary. There will be proprietary fuchsia bundles, sure, they are unfortunately standard with Android allready, but that was not the point.
JepZ 8y ago
Probably because the Gentoo ecosystem (package tree, package managers) is build for source packages and not for binary packages.
- neuland 8y ago
  Do you know if pacman is available on Chrome OS? My understanding is that it's based on Gentoo but it's heavily modified. So adding a different binary-based package manager isn't that crazy of an idea, especially for Google.
  - totallysnowman 8y ago
    Two package managers are a bad idea. They would need to cooperate somehow. Pacman developers probably have heard of Gentoo, but I wouldn't call it "based on Gentoo".
    - neuland 8y ago
      I meant that since pacman is not available, then use a different one entirely (not both). It seems it's a moot point b/c of the sibling comment saying the disk is read-only.
  - cbhl 8y ago
    Chrome OS puts the core operating system on a read-only partition, which is why people have been using chroots in developer mode up until now.
- darkr 8y ago
  Portage can work with binary packages just fine: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Binary_package_guide https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Binary_package_guide ChromeOS/ChromiumOS uses portage for its build system, to produce a signed, read-only image that the OS can boot from. CoreOS uses the same tooling FWIW: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/build http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/build This is why you can’t just install random packages onto the parent OS. Any additional software needs to run in some overlay filesystem or sandbox.
cbhl 8y ago
apt-get is still the golden standard for installing apps on Linux because of its dependency resolution system, and being able to "sudo apt-get install <package>" is a core use-case for end-users (i.e. students who are learning how to use Linux / code for the first time). Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on Chrome OS.
- colanderman 8y ago
  I'm a Debian user, but RedHat has had Yum (Apt-equivalent) for probably a decade now.
  - petecox 8y ago
    In terms of front-ends, there's always packagekit. The following will work on both rpm and dpkg derivatives: sudo pkcon install <package>
  - idonotknowwhy 8y ago
    Way more than a decade. I remember running yum on fedora core more than 15 years ago. These days it's all pacman for me though.
- magissima 8y ago
  Genuinely asking, what makes apt-get that much better than other package managers? Outside of Slackware I think good dependency resolution is pretty much universal at this point, and I can't say I've ever noticed any major problems with pacman, for instance.
  - seabrookmx 8y ago
    Technically speaking, nothing. Windows has a lot of users just because they're familiar with it. The same goes for Debian derivatives. A lot of people's first Linux distro is Ubuntu, so they get familiar with apt and don't have a compelling reason to use anything else. I'm a perfect example. The second package-manager I really interacted with was Alpine's "apk", and that's only because I've been working with Docker pretty extensively over the last year.
andmarios 8y ago
I believe they don't use Gentoo, rather they use Gentoo's build system (portage) to build ChromeOS. They use their own tree (ebuilds) and they don't include portage into ChromeOS.
terminalcommand 8y ago
I'd guess they wanted a simpler solution. Debian mostly has stable packages, but if users want more it is easier to get it compatible with Ubuntu repositories and packages. For example if chromeos users wanted to install steam on their system having a Debian base would help. Aside from this I'm really surprised that they are using Wayland instead of X11, this decision ought to bring some stability issues until Wayland gets widely adopted. If I were to guess this feature has been added as a freetime project amongst Google employees. As such, I don't think we can expect continuity. If those developers go away/get reassigned or lose enthusiasm, I don't think Google would allocate resources to maintain a linux VM inside their OS. IMHO if it were important to Google that users could be able to use Linux apps, they would've strived for binary compatibility with Linux from the beginning.
- vatueil 8y ago
  > If I were to guess this feature has been added as a freetime project amongst Google employees. I believe the impetus was enabling Android app development on Chrome OS. Google first said they were working on that a long time ago. I guess in the process of doing so they figured they might as well expand the functionality to cover all Linux apps, not just Android Studio. As such, I expect support will be stable. Chrome OS in general has had very solid support, too.
aurailious 8y ago
Technically it's a container not a VM. So using this is about sandboxing it from the OS.
- floatboth 8y ago
  Seems like they run the Debian in a KVM virtual machine, and containers inside that?
- kristianp 8y ago
  Any links for more info about containers vs VM there? The article just says: "That’s because Google is going to start shipping Chrome OS with a custom virtual machine that runs Debian Stretch, the current stable version of the operating system."
  - aurailious 8y ago
    I have been using this on my pixelbook and, unless I am wildly mistaken, it's generating an LXC container. Android apps for instance all run inside a single container for them as well The container itself is running Debian Stretch. However, for someone not using this it can be easily misinterpreted to mean a VM. Functionally it's not much different.
    - jacksmith21006 8y ago
      No it is a container on top of a VM. Different kernels. Android is just a container sharing a common Linux container with ChromeOS.
- jacksmith21006 8y ago
  Both. Machine containers on top of a VM.
hawski 8y ago
It is based on Gentoo as software can be based on make and gcc. But the user only sees the resulting binary. AFAIK Portage, Gentoo's package manage, is used only to build the rootfs image. Because Gentoo is really a meta distribution. This distinction is not an empty slogan. You can use Gentoo as a build system to create separate operating system, just like ChromeOS does. You can use of course use Gentoo directly and prepare tailor built binary packages to distribute them to users. Then it would be a bit more similar to other distributions. But ChromeOS is not an ordinary distribution. It's update model is not really compatible with typical distribution model. It's one of the greatest strengths of the system. You could shoehorn packages meta data, but it would be pointless, because whole image is updated at once.
dfaigonio 8y ago
Why does the Chrome OS team do anything the Chrome OS team does? They decided the best idea for low-end hardware is to run everything as a web app. They decided to make it practically useless without an Internet connection because clearly no one will use an ultraportable somewhere without Internet access. They decided to develop their own distro mostly from scratch because contributing to an existing project would be too easy, to useful, and would get them too much goodwill. They decided the best way to make the system easy to use was to split your files between local storage and the cloud so you don't know where anything is. It's a stupid idea from start to finish. You shouldn't try to make sense of it. And it depresses me. Its success demonstrates that Linux desktops could catch on in the mainstream market just fine if they had the marketing budget, brand recognition, and vendor support of Google. This team of idiots could have ended the hegemony of Microsoft and Apple for good.
- hutzlibu 8y ago
  Did you actually used ChromeOS? Anyway, short answer: because they heavily customized and changed a lot of things. They could not have done this with an existing Distro so easy. And sad as it is -> their goal is and was not to help the linux desktop - it is to help the google Eco system. Cloud-Service. Webapp. Makes perfect sense. No matter how much you want them to support the things you (or me) want. We linux users are not the target group, target group are ordinary newbs who like that everything just runs and don't like that their exe files somehow don't run anymore. But the ones who handle exe files per hand are rapidly declining I guess.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    It was already declining in the late 90's. Had Linux not appeared on the scene, BSD kept busy with their ongoing trial and UNIX like OSes would be surely much less relevant today.
  - dfaigonio 8y ago
    >Makes perfect sense. Maybe so. And as I said, that makes me sad. People who work hard to develop full-featured and high-quality software fail to make headway, but people who cynically manipulate others to lock them in to one company while providing nothing of value make millions. It's perfectly rational and perfectly disgusting. Chrome OS is worthless for its users. I don't much care how good it is for Google.
xg15 8y ago
I guess because they want to keep the actual OS locked down. This way you can run any kind of linux software and even pretend to be root, all without really having root access to the pixelbook.

bergie 8y ago

Sandboxing

rukittenme 8y ago

If I had to guess its because they want to move to their own proprietary systems and don't want to support backwards compatibility with "native" linux applications.

derefr 8y ago
Exactly–ChromeOS being Linux-based is, at this point, an implementation detail. No ChromeOS "apps" depend on that fact, because they all run under their own VMs or ABI sandboxes. This means that Google could make a Fuchsia-based ChromeOS and nothing in userland (save for the code of those VMs and sandboxes) would have to change.
- hutzlibu 8y ago
  Isn't Fuchsia OS as well, kust no GPL?
  - esprehn 8y ago
    Fuschia doesn't contain any Linux at all, hidden or otherwise. There's a compat layer you can run on top, but it's closer to the Windows subsystem for Linux than Chrome OS.
  - vatueil 8y ago
    Yes, various parts use BSD/MIT/Apache licenses, e.g.: https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/docs/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/docs/blob/master/LICENSE That said, parent comments seem to be talking about two different topics. Later comment about Google switching the underlying foundation of Chrome OS from Linux to Fuchsia sounds plausible, while earlier comment complaining about Fuchsia being proprietary is nonsense.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      It might not be proprietary, but if OEMs already only release updates at gun point with GPL, just wait until they get an OS with MIT like licenses given to them. It will be a big party.
      - hutzlibu 8y ago
        Still does not make Fuchsia proprietary. There will be proprietary fuchsia bundles, sure, they are unfortunately standard with Android allready, but that was not the point.

JepZ 8y ago

Probably because the Gentoo ecosystem (package tree, package managers) is build for source packages and not for binary packages.

neuland 8y ago
Do you know if pacman is available on Chrome OS? My understanding is that it's based on Gentoo but it's heavily modified. So adding a different binary-based package manager isn't that crazy of an idea, especially for Google.
- totallysnowman 8y ago
  Two package managers are a bad idea. They would need to cooperate somehow. Pacman developers probably have heard of Gentoo, but I wouldn't call it "based on Gentoo".
  - neuland 8y ago
    I meant that since pacman is not available, then use a different one entirely (not both). It seems it's a moot point b/c of the sibling comment saying the disk is read-only.
- cbhl 8y ago
  Chrome OS puts the core operating system on a read-only partition, which is why people have been using chroots in developer mode up until now.
darkr 8y ago
Portage can work with binary packages just fine: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Binary_package_guide https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Binary_package_guide ChromeOS/ChromiumOS uses portage for its build system, to produce a signed, read-only image that the OS can boot from. CoreOS uses the same tooling FWIW: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/build http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/build This is why you can’t just install random packages onto the parent OS. Any additional software needs to run in some overlay filesystem or sandbox.

cbhl 8y ago

apt-get is still the golden standard for installing apps on Linux because of its dependency resolution system, and being able to "sudo apt-get install <package>" is a core use-case for end-users (i.e. students who are learning how to use Linux / code for the first time). Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on Chrome OS.

colanderman 8y ago
I'm a Debian user, but RedHat has had Yum (Apt-equivalent) for probably a decade now.
- petecox 8y ago
  In terms of front-ends, there's always packagekit. The following will work on both rpm and dpkg derivatives: sudo pkcon install <package>
- idonotknowwhy 8y ago
  Way more than a decade. I remember running yum on fedora core more than 15 years ago. These days it's all pacman for me though.
magissima 8y ago
Genuinely asking, what makes apt-get that much better than other package managers? Outside of Slackware I think good dependency resolution is pretty much universal at this point, and I can't say I've ever noticed any major problems with pacman, for instance.
- seabrookmx 8y ago
  Technically speaking, nothing. Windows has a lot of users just because they're familiar with it. The same goes for Debian derivatives. A lot of people's first Linux distro is Ubuntu, so they get familiar with apt and don't have a compelling reason to use anything else. I'm a perfect example. The second package-manager I really interacted with was Alpine's "apk", and that's only because I've been working with Docker pretty extensively over the last year.

andmarios 8y ago

I believe they don't use Gentoo, rather they use Gentoo's build system (portage) to build ChromeOS. They use their own tree (ebuilds) and they don't include portage into ChromeOS.

terminalcommand 8y ago

I'd guess they wanted a simpler solution. Debian mostly has stable packages, but if users want more it is easier to get it compatible with Ubuntu repositories and packages. For example if chromeos users wanted to install steam on their system having a Debian base would help. Aside from this I'm really surprised that they are using Wayland instead of X11, this decision ought to bring some stability issues until Wayland gets widely adopted. If I were to guess this feature has been added as a freetime project amongst Google employees. As such, I don't think we can expect continuity. If those developers go away/get reassigned or lose enthusiasm, I don't think Google would allocate resources to maintain a linux VM inside their OS. IMHO if it were important to Google that users could be able to use Linux apps, they would've strived for binary compatibility with Linux from the beginning.

vatueil 8y ago
> If I were to guess this feature has been added as a freetime project amongst Google employees. I believe the impetus was enabling Android app development on Chrome OS. Google first said they were working on that a long time ago. I guess in the process of doing so they figured they might as well expand the functionality to cover all Linux apps, not just Android Studio. As such, I expect support will be stable. Chrome OS in general has had very solid support, too.

aurailious 8y ago

Technically it's a container not a VM. So using this is about sandboxing it from the OS.

floatboth 8y ago
Seems like they run the Debian in a KVM virtual machine, and containers inside that?
kristianp 8y ago
Any links for more info about containers vs VM there? The article just says: "That’s because Google is going to start shipping Chrome OS with a custom virtual machine that runs Debian Stretch, the current stable version of the operating system."
- aurailious 8y ago
  I have been using this on my pixelbook and, unless I am wildly mistaken, it's generating an LXC container. Android apps for instance all run inside a single container for them as well The container itself is running Debian Stretch. However, for someone not using this it can be easily misinterpreted to mean a VM. Functionally it's not much different.
  - jacksmith21006 8y ago
    No it is a container on top of a VM. Different kernels. Android is just a container sharing a common Linux container with ChromeOS.
jacksmith21006 8y ago
Both. Machine containers on top of a VM.

hawski 8y ago

It is based on Gentoo as software can be based on make and gcc. But the user only sees the resulting binary. AFAIK Portage, Gentoo's package manage, is used only to build the rootfs image. Because Gentoo is really a meta distribution. This distinction is not an empty slogan. You can use Gentoo as a build system to create separate operating system, just like ChromeOS does. You can use of course use Gentoo directly and prepare tailor built binary packages to distribute them to users. Then it would be a bit more similar to other distributions. But ChromeOS is not an ordinary distribution. It's update model is not really compatible with typical distribution model. It's one of the greatest strengths of the system. You could shoehorn packages meta data, but it would be pointless, because whole image is updated at once.

dfaigonio 8y ago

Why does the Chrome OS team do anything the Chrome OS team does? They decided the best idea for low-end hardware is to run everything as a web app. They decided to make it practically useless without an Internet connection because clearly no one will use an ultraportable somewhere without Internet access. They decided to develop their own distro mostly from scratch because contributing to an existing project would be too easy, to useful, and would get them too much goodwill. They decided the best way to make the system easy to use was to split your files between local storage and the cloud so you don't know where anything is. It's a stupid idea from start to finish. You shouldn't try to make sense of it. And it depresses me. Its success demonstrates that Linux desktops could catch on in the mainstream market just fine if they had the marketing budget, brand recognition, and vendor support of Google. This team of idiots could have ended the hegemony of Microsoft and Apple for good.

hutzlibu 8y ago
Did you actually used ChromeOS? Anyway, short answer: because they heavily customized and changed a lot of things. They could not have done this with an existing Distro so easy. And sad as it is -> their goal is and was not to help the linux desktop - it is to help the google Eco system. Cloud-Service. Webapp. Makes perfect sense. No matter how much you want them to support the things you (or me) want. We linux users are not the target group, target group are ordinary newbs who like that everything just runs and don't like that their exe files somehow don't run anymore. But the ones who handle exe files per hand are rapidly declining I guess.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  It was already declining in the late 90's. Had Linux not appeared on the scene, BSD kept busy with their ongoing trial and UNIX like OSes would be surely much less relevant today.
- dfaigonio 8y ago
  >Makes perfect sense. Maybe so. And as I said, that makes me sad. People who work hard to develop full-featured and high-quality software fail to make headway, but people who cynically manipulate others to lock them in to one company while providing nothing of value make millions. It's perfectly rational and perfectly disgusting. Chrome OS is worthless for its users. I don't much care how good it is for Google.

xg15 8y ago

I guess because they want to keep the actual OS locked down. This way you can run any kind of linux software and even pretend to be root, all without really having root access to the pixelbook.