6 ms·

I think the more interesting thing here is the fact that so much code in their repository appears to be bit-rotted or half baked, despite being documented. KASL

I think the more interesting thing here is the fact that so much code in their repository appears to be bit-rotted or half baked, despite being documented. KASLR is mentioned all over the place but doesn't work and the answer is "we know, it's there only to stop it bit-rotting". You need to patch the system to do kernel debugging because otherwise the toolchain hangs. Syscalls are documented as enforcing security rules yet the actual checks are //TODO comments (and they are still willing to assign CVEs so apparently they just forgot?!). The syzcaller tool is advertised as working with Fuschia, yet despite trying multiple different versions he can't even compile them due to API churn. Apparently downloading and executed a binary isn't even an option, despite their vision being that Fuschia is a sea of components downloaded and run from the internet. It's hard not to feel like maybe Google has lost the ability to develop operating systems. Fuschia has been in development for years now, it has no users outside of Google yet if you flick through their docs you'll notice a whole bunch of pages talking about deprecated components, migrations, etc. When I last looked at their docs, they read like it's been around for 20 years and has millions of apps, even though that's not true. Oh yeah and of course the giant BLM banners everywhere they have/used to have. Just checked, now those banners are replaced with "Honoring Asian Pacific American Heritage Month", lol. Apparently their vision of a futuristic OS is one in which every page in the docs has some random totally US centric bit of virtue signalling in it. No wonder they somehow can't even finish a microkernel, a design that reduces performance in return for a much smaller syscall surface area.

dec0dedab0de 4y ago
It's hard not to feel like maybe Google has lost the ability to develop operating systems. Did they ever have that ability? I know they did a bunch of work for Android/Chrome OS. But both of those are Linux, have they tried to develop an OS from scratch before fuschia?
- native_samples 4y ago
  Yes. Android is sufficiently different from a stock Linux distro that it absolutely counts as a unique operating system. ChromeOS is also unique in interesting ways, although less successful. It's certainly a production quality OS. Perhaps more importantly, both of those are complete and have real users who found value in them.
  - kllrnohj 4y ago
    > ChromeOS is also unique in interesting ways, although less successful. Chrome OS absolutely dominates the education market. So less successful than Android, sure (but so is literally every other OS at this point), but still very successful.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      That is an US phenomenon though. It can be hardly seen in European countries, and I bet other continents are hardly different.
      - kllrnohj 4y ago
        That's just not true. It might not be seen in your particular country, but it's definitely not US centric. Canada, Sweden, and New Zealand are also countries where Chromebooks are sweeping education https://www.neowin.net/news/chromebooks-are-seeing-huge-adoption-in-canada/ https://www.neowin.net/news/chromebooks-are-seeing-huge-adop... And the reasons why are pretty straightforward. Kids can't really mess them up, they are highly sharable (eg laptop carts), they are cheap (generally), and they have centralized management for schools that's otherwise typically limited to enterprise markets.
        pjmlp 4y ago
        In countries where parents pay for kids computers, and worry about what everyone else is using, they don't get any uptakes. Before COVID, most schools were still about pen and paper in most European countries, computers are used at home.
        kllrnohj 4y ago
        That's yet again not true. Parents are often paying for the Chromebooks used in some of these markets (eg, US & Canada at least). That the school requires a certain OS doesn't change who pays for it, just like parents are still buying TI graphing calculators. > Before COVID, most schools were still about pen and paper in most European countries, Gonna need a citation on that one. It'd be quite surprising for European schools to be so far behind And from what I can find, they weren't. Eg way back in 2006 https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/19/4242022/europe-ict-survey-reveals-deep-inequality https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/19/4242022/europe-ict-survey... "Scandinavian nations like Norway, Denmark, and Sweden are able to provide computing equipment to almost every single student and teacher within their borders"
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Android and Chrome OS use the Linux kernel, that is all. Everything else, including driver subsystem (Android docs even calls classic Linux drivers legacy), doesn't have anything to do with GNU/Linux.
shp0ngle 4y ago
I think you are downvoted because you touch on the BLM/Asian Pacific stuff, which tickles people. But yeah you are also very right.
- ignoramous 4y ago
  Just because they have those banners up doesn't mean those point to some latent reason for whatever is responsible for their woes. Granted it gives a window in to the culture of the Fuschia team at Google, but to me, personally, it doesn't come off as virtue-signalling at all but rather a conscious effort to put diversity and inclusion in the front and center of what they do. As another example, Google has had socio-political doodles for decades, but I never considered those as virtue-signalling.
  - native_samples 4y ago
    It's relevant because it reflects their priorities and how they view developers. The giant banners say this: although these are technical docs you may need to do your job, the most important thing you must see above all is an announcement of how morally pure we (think we) are. Once isn't enough. On our blog isn't enough. It must be the biggest and most eyecatching thing on literally every single page of our documentation. This indicates a lack of respect for the time and attention of devs. The implementation is also incompetent - the banner text appears to have leaked into search result snippets, thus reducing the utility of their docs search engine. When Steve Ballmer jumped around on stage yelling "developers! developers! developers!" he was ridiculed because the outburst of energy seemed absurd and out of place for a CEO. But many of us appreciated the sentiment - that if you're developing an operating system then developers matter and their time/attention matters. Ballmer knew that. Platforms aren't chicken/egg situations where it's unclear what comes first. Apps come first. Users come for the apps. Then more apps come to follow those early adopter users, but ultimately, there had to be some apps to kick things off. When the first thing you see at the top of the Fuschia docs is something totally unrelated to programming / the reason you were at that site, and which is irrelevant to most of the world as well, this sends a powerful message that the Fuschia devs are: a. Staggeringly US centric. Their mindset isn't international at all. This is offputting to those of us outside the US. Fuschia's front page claims it's "an inclusive, open source effort". Not only have they never even tested it with a non-English locale, but they ignored the critical locale bug for so long other people had to fork the project to even make the emulator start up for non-English users [1]. That's about as non-inclusive as you can get yet is also absolutely predictable. Did we really need the blog to tell us that? Not really, we could guess it quite easily. The sort of people who demand such banners always seem to be hypocrites. It's called virtue signalling for a reason - people who do it announce their principles but never seem to live by them. b. Not really rewarded for making developers happy. It reinforces a general impression about modern Google, that the personal success of the employees and executives is tied to things like the size of a giant black banner as much as whether their kernel is secure or their API docs are actually accurate. c. As such extremely likely to manipulate their platform to prioritize the happiness of activists over that of developers. It's a bold statement of ideological allegiance. Who in their right mind is going to write an app for Fuschia that's braver than a shopping cart when they see that? Nobody smart, because you can guess what will happen if Fuschia actually does get apps: half of them will end up banned for some inane, impossible to understand reason, probably related to mundane use of language that's inexplicably become unacceptable since yesterday in California. The financial risk of developing for this platform is huge. BTW: the Google doodles are pretty political these days, but in the beginning they were mostly reflecting things like national holidays. [1] https://github.com/assusdan/fuchsia-patches https://github.com/assusdan/fuchsia-patches
xmodem 4y ago
Or maybe it's just that building a kernel, network stack, etc from scratch, and getting it to the point where it's stable, secure, sufficiently performant, compatible etc, compared to what's already out there is a massive undertaking - microkernel or not - and they just need more time. Let's not forget that Android didn't even have smooth 60fps scrolling until well into the 2010s.
staticassertion 4y ago
Building an OS takes time, they're doing it incrementally, the bugs were known and even had issues for them already. I wouldn't draw any crazy conclusions from this research, this is a hacker's exploration of a foreign OS, which is very interesting, but isn't something I'd draw judgments from.

dec0dedab0de 4y ago

It's hard not to feel like maybe Google has lost the ability to develop operating systems. Did they ever have that ability? I know they did a bunch of work for Android/Chrome OS. But both of those are Linux, have they tried to develop an OS from scratch before fuschia?

native_samples 4y ago
Yes. Android is sufficiently different from a stock Linux distro that it absolutely counts as a unique operating system. ChromeOS is also unique in interesting ways, although less successful. It's certainly a production quality OS. Perhaps more importantly, both of those are complete and have real users who found value in them.
- kllrnohj 4y ago
  > ChromeOS is also unique in interesting ways, although less successful. Chrome OS absolutely dominates the education market. So less successful than Android, sure (but so is literally every other OS at this point), but still very successful.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    That is an US phenomenon though. It can be hardly seen in European countries, and I bet other continents are hardly different.
    - kllrnohj 4y ago
      That's just not true. It might not be seen in your particular country, but it's definitely not US centric. Canada, Sweden, and New Zealand are also countries where Chromebooks are sweeping education https://www.neowin.net/news/chromebooks-are-seeing-huge-adoption-in-canada/ https://www.neowin.net/news/chromebooks-are-seeing-huge-adop... And the reasons why are pretty straightforward. Kids can't really mess them up, they are highly sharable (eg laptop carts), they are cheap (generally), and they have centralized management for schools that's otherwise typically limited to enterprise markets.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        In countries where parents pay for kids computers, and worry about what everyone else is using, they don't get any uptakes. Before COVID, most schools were still about pen and paper in most European countries, computers are used at home.
        kllrnohj 4y ago
        That's yet again not true. Parents are often paying for the Chromebooks used in some of these markets (eg, US & Canada at least). That the school requires a certain OS doesn't change who pays for it, just like parents are still buying TI graphing calculators. > Before COVID, most schools were still about pen and paper in most European countries, Gonna need a citation on that one. It'd be quite surprising for European schools to be so far behind And from what I can find, they weren't. Eg way back in 2006 https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/19/4242022/europe-ict-survey-reveals-deep-inequality https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/19/4242022/europe-ict-survey... "Scandinavian nations like Norway, Denmark, and Sweden are able to provide computing equipment to almost every single student and teacher within their borders"
pjmlp 4y ago
Android and Chrome OS use the Linux kernel, that is all. Everything else, including driver subsystem (Android docs even calls classic Linux drivers legacy), doesn't have anything to do with GNU/Linux.

shp0ngle 4y ago

I think you are downvoted because you touch on the BLM/Asian Pacific stuff, which tickles people. But yeah you are also very right.

ignoramous 4y ago
Just because they have those banners up doesn't mean those point to some latent reason for whatever is responsible for their woes. Granted it gives a window in to the culture of the Fuschia team at Google, but to me, personally, it doesn't come off as virtue-signalling at all but rather a conscious effort to put diversity and inclusion in the front and center of what they do. As another example, Google has had socio-political doodles for decades, but I never considered those as virtue-signalling.
- native_samples 4y ago
  It's relevant because it reflects their priorities and how they view developers. The giant banners say this: although these are technical docs you may need to do your job, the most important thing you must see above all is an announcement of how morally pure we (think we) are. Once isn't enough. On our blog isn't enough. It must be the biggest and most eyecatching thing on literally every single page of our documentation. This indicates a lack of respect for the time and attention of devs. The implementation is also incompetent - the banner text appears to have leaked into search result snippets, thus reducing the utility of their docs search engine. When Steve Ballmer jumped around on stage yelling "developers! developers! developers!" he was ridiculed because the outburst of energy seemed absurd and out of place for a CEO. But many of us appreciated the sentiment - that if you're developing an operating system then developers matter and their time/attention matters. Ballmer knew that. Platforms aren't chicken/egg situations where it's unclear what comes first. Apps come first. Users come for the apps. Then more apps come to follow those early adopter users, but ultimately, there had to be some apps to kick things off. When the first thing you see at the top of the Fuschia docs is something totally unrelated to programming / the reason you were at that site, and which is irrelevant to most of the world as well, this sends a powerful message that the Fuschia devs are: a. Staggeringly US centric. Their mindset isn't international at all. This is offputting to those of us outside the US. Fuschia's front page claims it's "an inclusive, open source effort". Not only have they never even tested it with a non-English locale, but they ignored the critical locale bug for so long other people had to fork the project to even make the emulator start up for non-English users [1]. That's about as non-inclusive as you can get yet is also absolutely predictable. Did we really need the blog to tell us that? Not really, we could guess it quite easily. The sort of people who demand such banners always seem to be hypocrites. It's called virtue signalling for a reason - people who do it announce their principles but never seem to live by them. b. Not really rewarded for making developers happy. It reinforces a general impression about modern Google, that the personal success of the employees and executives is tied to things like the size of a giant black banner as much as whether their kernel is secure or their API docs are actually accurate. c. As such extremely likely to manipulate their platform to prioritize the happiness of activists over that of developers. It's a bold statement of ideological allegiance. Who in their right mind is going to write an app for Fuschia that's braver than a shopping cart when they see that? Nobody smart, because you can guess what will happen if Fuschia actually does get apps: half of them will end up banned for some inane, impossible to understand reason, probably related to mundane use of language that's inexplicably become unacceptable since yesterday in California. The financial risk of developing for this platform is huge. BTW: the Google doodles are pretty political these days, but in the beginning they were mostly reflecting things like national holidays. [1] https://github.com/assusdan/fuchsia-patches https://github.com/assusdan/fuchsia-patches

xmodem 4y ago

Or maybe it's just that building a kernel, network stack, etc from scratch, and getting it to the point where it's stable, secure, sufficiently performant, compatible etc, compared to what's already out there is a massive undertaking - microkernel or not - and they just need more time. Let's not forget that Android didn't even have smooth 60fps scrolling until well into the 2010s.

staticassertion 4y ago

Building an OS takes time, they're doing it incrementally, the bugs were known and even had issues for them already. I wouldn't draw any crazy conclusions from this research, this is a hacker's exploration of a foreign OS, which is very interesting, but isn't something I'd draw judgments from.