16 ms·

Android removes much of Fuchsia-related code as Starnix project progresses

214 points by cpeterso 4y ago

chasil 4y ago
- myrryr 4y ago
  So, you decided to jump in and talk about this rather than the article? Axe to grind much? It isn't finished yet, and some of the security parts in the documentation have TODOs in the code. You know, as a project which is well well well before release usually is. As for "Why didn't Google just buy QNX/Blackberry?" they basically grabbed the BEOS kernel developer, and are using Zircon as their kernel.
  - chasil 4y ago
    I read the article, and I do hope that Fuchsia is successful. A fast and secure microkernel that is open source would truly be godsend for many security needs, and a threat to each and all monolithic kernels. The article is rather light on detail, dwells on a "starnix shell" (which sounds like dom0 not mksh), goes on about a clock widget, but adds this: "It’s now been over a year since the Starnix proposal was accepted and work began. In that time, the Fuchsia team has made significant progress in making Linux programs capable of running on Fuchsia devices." When I build a chroot() for a legacy application, I am expecting to dramatically raise the difficulty of exploitation. I shouldn't have that expectation of Fuchsia just yet, even though it has been released into commercial products. We are all really hoping for a kernel that "just works, and never needs patching" in the manner of chacha. I guess not yet.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
cletus 4y ago
I worked at Google up until 2017. In the last year or two of my time there I had many conversation with some people who worked for or were adjacent to the Fuchsia team. It's hard to believe it's been 6 years. We're now talking billions (quite literally) of dollars later and all we've got to show for it is an OS for the Nest? The core of the technical leadership on Fuchsia were, I believe, Android refugees so they had a very Android-centric way of looking at the world. The two premises for Fuchsia seemed to be: 1. There is no way to remove devices drivers from the Linux kernel. That goal was seen as desirable in terms of improving reliability, how long devices were supported for and the time taken to roll out updates. Upstreaming driver changes was something phone manufacturers just didn't do and didn't want to do. Linux has no stable ABI for device drivers; and 2. The Android ecosystem itself needed a reboot. This one is harder to define but, for example, you had duplication of services between the all-but-dead AOSP and Play services. Remember these are statements of fact. These are my impression of the beliefs of Fuchsia technical leadership. Google had always had hopes that there would be a healthy ecosystem of phone manufacturers. For awhile there were but now? Now it's really just Samsung. Samsung and Google, much like the Wintel alliance of Microsoft and Intel years ago, was an unhappy marriage of convenience. Samsung had tried (and repeatedly failed) to make their own OS. And Google didn't like Samsung being the consumer face of Android. So the question I raised was: given that Samsung in an unhappy spouse in a loveless marriage of necessity, how are you going to convince Samsung to switch to Fuchsia? I still see no answer to that. Maybe something interesting and useful will come out of Fuchsia eventually. I for one am not holding my breath however. It screams of being the pet project of some very high level engineers.
- ncann 4y ago
  > It screams of being the pet project of some very high level engineers. This seems true of so many Google projects lately, big promises that don't deliver and get shelved in a few years.
  - lumost 4y ago
    This is a Truism of big anything. Once people are high enough in an organization and we’ll connected enough… their projects are unassailable. I can guarantee you that somewhere in google is a team of 3 getting shut down for making 100MM a year with a boring tech focus. Meanwhile Fuscia continues unquestioned.
  - cbozeman 4y ago
    This isn't a "lately" phenomenon. This has been the Standard Google Playbook for about the past 15 years.
  - baobob 4y ago
    This comment and the parent got me thinking of the contrast between "privilege" and "merit" as useful ways to describe some of the difference between small company land and the likes of Google. How many product disasters could be attributed to the wrong people accidentally possessing or ageing into privilege? I wonder if Plus or Reader could be phrased in these terms
    - djbusby 4y ago
      I don't think one just ages into privilege. One early win to make some marks would certainly help and give privilege for next projects.
      - lumost 4y ago
        This is true, but there is a survivorship bias. Someone who sticks around gains credit from the work of those who left. Exponential growth in a core business means promotions for everyone. Someone who is considered "good" gets looped into key projects. After 4-5 years these become a self-fulfilling prophecy in some organizations, as "good" people get attached to the growth drivers.
0xedd 4y ago
Disgusting move by Google to further reign in what hardware and software you can use, how you use it and how quickly you have to upgrade your device. If they only wanted to cut ties with Oracle Java and have an unrelated OS, they'd adapt Linux. A number of companies are already working on it. But, that won't let Google own the entire chain from hardware to software in order to screw over customers. Zero innovations in the mobile world for easily a decade. Because companies like Google are too busy running VMs on mobile.
- shakna 4y ago
  The bigger problem of Linux for Google is that: a) Linux doesn't have a stable driver ABI. b) Manufacturers will not upstream their drivers. It's been years and they simply won't. Google have been beating against this for years and getting absolutely nowhere. It's the same thing that Linux has ongoing issues with, and have made significant inroads with, for things that aren't tablets or phones. But manufacturers do not want their drivers to be public. The reasons no longer matter, decades of compromise has resulted in the hardware partners shifting not a single ioata.
  - chasil 4y ago
    Are these kernel modules? Doesn't modprobe/insmod of a driver bring it into a strict GPLv2 environment? If so, the Software Freedom Conservancy needs to "busybox" the recalcitrant OEMs.
    - wmf 4y ago
      Yes, no, and this is beyond SFC. Linus himself authorized proprietary kernel modules decades ago.
      - chasil 4y ago
        That scoundrel! :)
      - TingPing 4y ago
        Linus is only one copyright holder. Only a court can decide that.
frozenport 4y ago
This is what happens when a company has too much money. Why is native android support required, when for example they could be emulated? Are developers going to really release apps for a fuschia phone without testing? Recall this is a space where every device is different. If developers and going to test and modify their code, is too hard to ask them to recompile using a fuschia tool chain?
- wmf 4y ago
  Fuschiadroid needs to run all legacy Android apps unmodified. App developers definitely do not test on all or even many phones.
  - tinus_hn 4y ago
    That’s why you shouldn’t ask them to do it, you have to make it easy to do it and then tell them to do it or their app isn’t going on the store.
    - malermeister 4y ago
      That's one way to quickly kill a big chunk of your app ecosystem. Google has the same issue Microsoft has now, where everything needs to be compatible with ancient apps written for Win95.
      - tinus_hn 4y ago
        Only if you buy into Raymond Chens fairytales. In reality there’s plenty of software that is not at all compatible with Windows later than XP or later than 7.
rvz 4y ago
Unsurprisingly, this paves the way for apps to be written for Linux or Android apps to work on Fuchsia on day 1 with Starnix. I will not be surprised to see that Fuchsia / Zircon will replace Linux and be the base of ChromeOS. So this looks more than likely that Fuchsia is progressing to first replace ChromeOS, and then in the next couple of years to replace Android, as I predicted years ago. [0] Far from an 'experiment' as wrongly predicted by many others 4 or 5 years ago. [1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21962578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21962578 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17568335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17568335
- nly 4y ago
  Seems like tonnes of investment for sod all gain.
- resoluteteeth 4y ago
  Fuchsia's development has taken a huge amount of time and the problem with trying to switch ChromeOS to Fuchsia is that if there are ANY regressions as a result (including to android support or crostini), a ton of people will be very unhappy. If there are any downsides, it would have to be WAY better in terms of user experience to make up for that, and I'm not sure that seems likely right now. It also wouldn't solve the fundamental problem of ChromeOS which is that it doesn't have it's own apps (there were Chrome apps but they were deprecated) and only offers a somewhat imperfect experience for linux and android apps. To overcome that, Google would have to already have worked out a new approach for native Fuchsia apps to commit to it (which would probably mean committing to Fuchsia replacing android) and I'm not convinced Google is capable of making that type of decision in its current state.
GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
Starnix seems like a lot of work, it’ll be interesting to see how bug-for-bug compatible they can get it
- dataflow 4y ago
  It sounds like the Fuchsia analog of WSL1. Fuchsia Subsystem for Android?
- dcow 4y ago
  Rust just doesn't let you write bugs so... ...
  - amtamt 4y ago
    Don't underestimate human ingenuity.
_ugfj 4y ago
Mmmmmm a kernel call translator. Microsoft attempted to do it with WSL. Then abandoned the idea and went with a VM called WSL v2. I have no solid proof but I believe at least one of the factors were https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2028 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2028 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/3031 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/3031 -- the ptrace() syscall is not a single syscall but more like the infamous rabbit hole which you have no idea the depth of.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  WSL1 is a lot better for some use cases, are you sure they gave up on it?
  - notRobot 4y ago
    They're no longer working on it, so that appears to be the case?
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      They said they were still working on it, was that not true? It's functional enough that it's hard to tell at a glance.
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        > They said they were still working on it, was that not true? Almost certainly yes. Microsoft almost never fully abandons projects, but they keep them in limbo for years and have no qualms about claiming they are still working on them. I bet they never officially stopped working on WinForms either.
        leosarev 4y ago
        Winforms now is alive. They are accepting pull requests and have team to fix issues and even add small features
uluyol 4y ago
So starnix is a tool being worked on at Google (in Rust, [1]) to implement Linux's syscall layer and is validated against test cases [2] written for gVisor, also a program that implements Linux's syscalls, but one that is instead written in Go [3]. I see NIH is growing even stronger at Google. Why not build on gVisor, rather than re-implement everything from scratch? [1] https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/main/src/proc/bin/starnix/ https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/main/s... [2] https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/main/src/proc/bin/starnix/#updating-starnix-when-running-prebuilt-tests https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/main/s... [3] https://gvisor.dev/ https://gvisor.dev/
- codemac 4y ago
  "implementing linux syscalls" ==> a million tools. I'm not sure it's strong logic to re-use something else because it implements linux syscalls, the hard part is what it does after it receives the syscall.
- advisedwang 4y ago
  gvisor is a Google project, this isn't NIH. gVisor provides a linux syscall interface to the guest, but ultimately calls a linux syscalls when it needs to invoke something in the host. That obviously doesn't work for a linux-on-fuschia compat layer. I guess you could re-use the guest side, but if gVisor wasn't written for pluggable backends it's probably more work to do that refactor than just build a separate tool.
  - bongobingo1 4y ago
    From the outside looking in, it's seemed that Not Invented by this Team is just as likely a factor as NIH at google.
  - iangudger 4y ago
    > That obviously doesn't work for a linux-on-fuschia compat layer. This isn’t actually true. gVisor contains full implementations of Linux syscalls and only relies on host syscalls being the same for some interoperability features between sandboxed and host applications. It would be completely possible to port gVisor to a non-Linux operating system.
justapassenger 4y ago
It’s likely unrelated and caused by UI and generally old and underpowered HW, but since my Nest was updated to Fuchsia it’s much less reliable, very often laggy and generally frustrating to use. My only two use cases are photo album and playing YouTube music. Both of them are features, fully integrated with whole google ecosystem and TBH, just embarrassing.
- slac 4y ago
  How does one know if it got installed?
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Easy, it is the default OS on the latest models. https://9to5google.com/2022/06/23/google-fuchsia-nest-hub-max/ https://9to5google.com/2022/06/23/google-fuchsia-nest-hub-ma...
- ladyanita22 4y ago
  I mean, if you noticed a different, it's not the HW at fault, but the software. If Linux ran more efficiently, that's a con of using Fuchsia.
  - justapassenger 4y ago
    I don’t know what changes they made in the app layer that runs there, so I’m not making definite judgment. So far I only have correlation, not causation.
    - alophawen 4y ago
      That seems to be enough to bring out the pitch fork for most peopl these days.
philonoist 4y ago
So its clear now no one will be using Dart or Flutter.
- refulgentis 4y ago
  Opposite, growth exploded.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  That has been clear since original team left and AdWords managed to keep the remaining ones to avoid going back to GWT. Dart is one trick pony.
  - myko 4y ago
    Very confusing to see this considering most mobile developers I know (completely anecdotal) who use cross platform tools have moved from RN to Flutter for myriad reasons.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      A tiny drop in statistics.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    Dart died when Chrome competitors - mostly Mozilla at the time - refused to include another VM in the browser. On the one hand I think it’s a shame because Dart is much better than even the last version of JS. On the other hand wasm and transpiling solved a lot of the issues Dart was trying to solve with less fragmentation so all things considered maybe it was the right decision.
    - cpeterso 4y ago
      > Dart died when Chrome competitors - mostly Mozilla at the time - refused to include another VM in the browser. Chrome didn’t even include the Dart VM. It was only available in special “Dartium” builds because the Chrome team didn’t want it either. https://news.dartlang.org/2012/04/dartium-for-windows-now-available.html https://news.dartlang.org/2012/04/dartium-for-windows-now-av...
anewpersonality 4y ago
Sad to see Fuchsia die and wither like this.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  It's been hyped a lot then killed. Another g project in the grave.
  - logicchains 4y ago
    Almost any software project from Google with some kind of user-facing API seems to fail, because Google somehow sucks at API design. Like how awful to use Tensorflow became, leading to it getting largely replaced by PyTorch. Or how complex and convoluted AngularJS was, compared to ReactJS which replaced it. Google's design philosophy seems to be the polar opposite of Linux's "Don't break userspace", so I can see why application developers wouldn't trust a kernel written by them. Dart itself is another example: it started similar to Typescript, but Typescript quickly grew to surpass it in every way. Because Typescript eagerly learned from modern programming language theory, while Dart stuck to Google's "try to make everything like 1990s OO" approach.
    - Tomuus 4y ago
      Platforms. Google sucks at building platforms. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMNmnGgfV/?k=1 https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMNmnGgfV/?k=1
      - anewpersonality 4y ago
        What's this TokTok?
amtamt 4y ago
And what happens to Starnix, the IT consulting company that is first in search results as of now?
- klohto 4y ago
  That Starnix link is so weak that even 9to5google is second result. What’s up with the obsession that naming needs to be unique? > What is the Starnix IT website? > Searches “Starnix” > Oh no, the first result isn’t what I’m looking for > I’m such a dum dum that I won’t search “Starnix IT” By the way, they have 2 employees.
  - bogwog 4y ago
    > What’s up with the obsession that naming needs to be unique? ...lawsuits > By the way, they have 2 employees. What difference does that make?
    - klohto 4y ago
      What? On what basis are you going to sue them? That they have the same name? They don't even have any product.
      - starnix_og 4y ago
        Hey guys. We're a 24 year old consultancy in Toronto. We are very much an active company with a line of products and services. And yes we have more than two employees (not sure where that came from). We've been advocates of free and open source software and active members of the community since the early 90s. We co-founded the non-profit Linux Professional Institute in '99 and are still actively engaged daily with the organization and its mission. Feel free to reach out to our info@ if you'd like to open a dialogue. As for our website, well... that's what you get with a tech company run by tech folks :) -The Starnix Inc team
pphysch 4y ago
> Easily the most ambitious of these is a clear intention for some Fuchsia devices to be able to run apps from other operating systems like Android and Linux. This line is hilarious to me because when SV learned that HarmonyOS could run Android OS/apps, the common refrain was "HarmonyOS is a literal android clone!!!" But when a SV corp does it, it's "ambitious". And one can only imagine the hagiographics if Apple was the one running Android apps natively on iOS... SV needs some deep, deep introspection if it is ever going to get ahead of the curve again.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  The difference is that the HarmonyOS API was just a fork of Android, even if the underlying system changed (and it wasn't changed that much). Fuchsia is completely different, from the kernel all the way to the API. The end result isn't what's ambitious. Linux can do this today, and run Windows applications at the same time. What's ambitious is getting different APIs to work together well on a system that's designed radically differently. The overlap lies in Flutter (the "we'll ship our own GUI toolkit with the application code" approach), not in the underlying framework. I imagine Apple could quite easily get Android apps to work on iOS if it wanted to. They need a wrapper for Linux calls, which they can borrow from Google in this case, and they need part of the Android framework, which can be made to run on the wrapper. It wouldn't take more than a year for the first proof of concepts to come out, I'd reckon. Apple just has no reason to want to run Android apps because they're not the ones that are in desperate need of market share like HarmonyOS.
- phh 4y ago
  Except that HarmonyOS (for smartphones) is actually bog standard Linux/Android? While in this case, they are rewriting the kernel (but I agree that it looks like it'll remain normal Android for the upper layers)
tgv 4y ago
So they were actually putting code in Android for the sake of their own Fuchsia? How did that exactly benefit Android users?
- resoluteteeth 4y ago
  Presumably it would benefit people using Android in Fuchsia, like how putting drivers for various hypervisors in the linux kernel benefits people who are using linux in those hypervisors.
aaa_aaa 4y ago
Restricted Mode: https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/c/fuchsia/+/688090/6/docs/contribute/governance/rfcs/NNNN_fast_and_efficient_user_space_kernel_emulation.md https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/c/fuchsia/+/688090/6...
ncmncm 4y ago
Based on the Fuchsia code that has been posted on HN, the less of it there is, the better off the world is.

214 points by cpeterso 4y ago

myrryr 4y ago
So, you decided to jump in and talk about this rather than the article? Axe to grind much? It isn't finished yet, and some of the security parts in the documentation have TODOs in the code. You know, as a project which is well well well before release usually is. As for "Why didn't Google just buy QNX/Blackberry?" they basically grabbed the BEOS kernel developer, and are using Zircon as their kernel.
- chasil 4y ago
  I read the article, and I do hope that Fuchsia is successful. A fast and secure microkernel that is open source would truly be godsend for many security needs, and a threat to each and all monolithic kernels. The article is rather light on detail, dwells on a "starnix shell" (which sounds like dom0 not mksh), goes on about a clock widget, but adds this: "It’s now been over a year since the Starnix proposal was accepted and work began. In that time, the Fuchsia team has made significant progress in making Linux programs capable of running on Fuchsia devices." When I build a chroot() for a legacy application, I am expecting to dramatically raise the difficulty of exploitation. I shouldn't have that expectation of Fuchsia just yet, even though it has been released into commercial products. We are all really hoping for a kernel that "just works, and never needs patching" in the manner of chacha. I guess not yet.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

I worked at Google up until 2017. In the last year or two of my time there I had many conversation with some people who worked for or were adjacent to the Fuchsia team. It's hard to believe it's been 6 years. We're now talking billions (quite literally) of dollars later and all we've got to show for it is an OS for the Nest? The core of the technical leadership on Fuchsia were, I believe, Android refugees so they had a very Android-centric way of looking at the world. The two premises for Fuchsia seemed to be: 1. There is no way to remove devices drivers from the Linux kernel. That goal was seen as desirable in terms of improving reliability, how long devices were supported for and the time taken to roll out updates. Upstreaming driver changes was something phone manufacturers just didn't do and didn't want to do. Linux has no stable ABI for device drivers; and 2. The Android ecosystem itself needed a reboot. This one is harder to define but, for example, you had duplication of services between the all-but-dead AOSP and Play services. Remember these are statements of fact. These are my impression of the beliefs of Fuchsia technical leadership. Google had always had hopes that there would be a healthy ecosystem of phone manufacturers. For awhile there were but now? Now it's really just Samsung. Samsung and Google, much like the Wintel alliance of Microsoft and Intel years ago, was an unhappy marriage of convenience. Samsung had tried (and repeatedly failed) to make their own OS. And Google didn't like Samsung being the consumer face of Android. So the question I raised was: given that Samsung in an unhappy spouse in a loveless marriage of necessity, how are you going to convince Samsung to switch to Fuchsia? I still see no answer to that. Maybe something interesting and useful will come out of Fuchsia eventually. I for one am not holding my breath however. It screams of being the pet project of some very high level engineers.

ncann 4y ago
> It screams of being the pet project of some very high level engineers. This seems true of so many Google projects lately, big promises that don't deliver and get shelved in a few years.
- lumost 4y ago
  This is a Truism of big anything. Once people are high enough in an organization and we’ll connected enough… their projects are unassailable. I can guarantee you that somewhere in google is a team of 3 getting shut down for making 100MM a year with a boring tech focus. Meanwhile Fuscia continues unquestioned.
- cbozeman 4y ago
  This isn't a "lately" phenomenon. This has been the Standard Google Playbook for about the past 15 years.
- baobob 4y ago
  This comment and the parent got me thinking of the contrast between "privilege" and "merit" as useful ways to describe some of the difference between small company land and the likes of Google. How many product disasters could be attributed to the wrong people accidentally possessing or ageing into privilege? I wonder if Plus or Reader could be phrased in these terms
  - djbusby 4y ago
    I don't think one just ages into privilege. One early win to make some marks would certainly help and give privilege for next projects.
    - lumost 4y ago
      This is true, but there is a survivorship bias. Someone who sticks around gains credit from the work of those who left. Exponential growth in a core business means promotions for everyone. Someone who is considered "good" gets looped into key projects. After 4-5 years these become a self-fulfilling prophecy in some organizations, as "good" people get attached to the growth drivers.

0xedd 4y ago

Disgusting move by Google to further reign in what hardware and software you can use, how you use it and how quickly you have to upgrade your device. If they only wanted to cut ties with Oracle Java and have an unrelated OS, they'd adapt Linux. A number of companies are already working on it. But, that won't let Google own the entire chain from hardware to software in order to screw over customers. Zero innovations in the mobile world for easily a decade. Because companies like Google are too busy running VMs on mobile.

shakna 4y ago
The bigger problem of Linux for Google is that: a) Linux doesn't have a stable driver ABI. b) Manufacturers will not upstream their drivers. It's been years and they simply won't. Google have been beating against this for years and getting absolutely nowhere. It's the same thing that Linux has ongoing issues with, and have made significant inroads with, for things that aren't tablets or phones. But manufacturers do not want their drivers to be public. The reasons no longer matter, decades of compromise has resulted in the hardware partners shifting not a single ioata.
- chasil 4y ago
  Are these kernel modules? Doesn't modprobe/insmod of a driver bring it into a strict GPLv2 environment? If so, the Software Freedom Conservancy needs to "busybox" the recalcitrant OEMs.
  - wmf 4y ago
    Yes, no, and this is beyond SFC. Linus himself authorized proprietary kernel modules decades ago.
    - chasil 4y ago
      That scoundrel! :)
    - TingPing 4y ago
      Linus is only one copyright holder. Only a court can decide that.

frozenport 4y ago

This is what happens when a company has too much money. Why is native android support required, when for example they could be emulated? Are developers going to really release apps for a fuschia phone without testing? Recall this is a space where every device is different. If developers and going to test and modify their code, is too hard to ask them to recompile using a fuschia tool chain?

wmf 4y ago
Fuschiadroid needs to run all legacy Android apps unmodified. App developers definitely do not test on all or even many phones.
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  That’s why you shouldn’t ask them to do it, you have to make it easy to do it and then tell them to do it or their app isn’t going on the store.
  - malermeister 4y ago
    That's one way to quickly kill a big chunk of your app ecosystem. Google has the same issue Microsoft has now, where everything needs to be compatible with ancient apps written for Win95.
    - tinus_hn 4y ago
      Only if you buy into Raymond Chens fairytales. In reality there’s plenty of software that is not at all compatible with Windows later than XP or later than 7.

rvz 4y ago

Unsurprisingly, this paves the way for apps to be written for Linux or Android apps to work on Fuchsia on day 1 with Starnix. I will not be surprised to see that Fuchsia / Zircon will replace Linux and be the base of ChromeOS. So this looks more than likely that Fuchsia is progressing to first replace ChromeOS, and then in the next couple of years to replace Android, as I predicted years ago. [0] Far from an 'experiment' as wrongly predicted by many others 4 or 5 years ago. [1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21962578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21962578 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17568335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17568335

nly 4y ago
Seems like tonnes of investment for sod all gain.
resoluteteeth 4y ago
Fuchsia's development has taken a huge amount of time and the problem with trying to switch ChromeOS to Fuchsia is that if there are ANY regressions as a result (including to android support or crostini), a ton of people will be very unhappy. If there are any downsides, it would have to be WAY better in terms of user experience to make up for that, and I'm not sure that seems likely right now. It also wouldn't solve the fundamental problem of ChromeOS which is that it doesn't have it's own apps (there were Chrome apps but they were deprecated) and only offers a somewhat imperfect experience for linux and android apps. To overcome that, Google would have to already have worked out a new approach for native Fuchsia apps to commit to it (which would probably mean committing to Fuchsia replacing android) and I'm not convinced Google is capable of making that type of decision in its current state.

GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago

Starnix seems like a lot of work, it’ll be interesting to see how bug-for-bug compatible they can get it

dataflow 4y ago
It sounds like the Fuchsia analog of WSL1. Fuchsia Subsystem for Android?
dcow 4y ago
Rust just doesn't let you write bugs so... ...
- amtamt 4y ago
  Don't underestimate human ingenuity.

_ugfj 4y ago

Mmmmmm a kernel call translator. Microsoft attempted to do it with WSL. Then abandoned the idea and went with a VM called WSL v2. I have no solid proof but I believe at least one of the factors were https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2028 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2028 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/3031 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/3031 -- the ptrace() syscall is not a single syscall but more like the infamous rabbit hole which you have no idea the depth of.

Dylan16807 4y ago
WSL1 is a lot better for some use cases, are you sure they gave up on it?
- notRobot 4y ago
  They're no longer working on it, so that appears to be the case?
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    They said they were still working on it, was that not true? It's functional enough that it's hard to tell at a glance.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      > They said they were still working on it, was that not true? Almost certainly yes. Microsoft almost never fully abandons projects, but they keep them in limbo for years and have no qualms about claiming they are still working on them. I bet they never officially stopped working on WinForms either.
      - leosarev 4y ago
        Winforms now is alive. They are accepting pull requests and have team to fix issues and even add small features

uluyol 4y ago

So starnix is a tool being worked on at Google (in Rust, [1]) to implement Linux's syscall layer and is validated against test cases [2] written for gVisor, also a program that implements Linux's syscalls, but one that is instead written in Go [3]. I see NIH is growing even stronger at Google. Why not build on gVisor, rather than re-implement everything from scratch? [1] https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/main/src/proc/bin/starnix/ https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/main/s... [2] https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/main/src/proc/bin/starnix/#updating-starnix-when-running-prebuilt-tests https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/main/s... [3] https://gvisor.dev/ https://gvisor.dev/

codemac 4y ago
"implementing linux syscalls" ==> a million tools. I'm not sure it's strong logic to re-use something else because it implements linux syscalls, the hard part is what it does after it receives the syscall.
advisedwang 4y ago
gvisor is a Google project, this isn't NIH. gVisor provides a linux syscall interface to the guest, but ultimately calls a linux syscalls when it needs to invoke something in the host. That obviously doesn't work for a linux-on-fuschia compat layer. I guess you could re-use the guest side, but if gVisor wasn't written for pluggable backends it's probably more work to do that refactor than just build a separate tool.
- bongobingo1 4y ago
  From the outside looking in, it's seemed that Not Invented by this Team is just as likely a factor as NIH at google.
- iangudger 4y ago
  > That obviously doesn't work for a linux-on-fuschia compat layer. This isn’t actually true. gVisor contains full implementations of Linux syscalls and only relies on host syscalls being the same for some interoperability features between sandboxed and host applications. It would be completely possible to port gVisor to a non-Linux operating system.

justapassenger 4y ago

It’s likely unrelated and caused by UI and generally old and underpowered HW, but since my Nest was updated to Fuchsia it’s much less reliable, very often laggy and generally frustrating to use. My only two use cases are photo album and playing YouTube music. Both of them are features, fully integrated with whole google ecosystem and TBH, just embarrassing.

slac 4y ago
How does one know if it got installed?
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Easy, it is the default OS on the latest models. https://9to5google.com/2022/06/23/google-fuchsia-nest-hub-max/ https://9to5google.com/2022/06/23/google-fuchsia-nest-hub-ma...
ladyanita22 4y ago
I mean, if you noticed a different, it's not the HW at fault, but the software. If Linux ran more efficiently, that's a con of using Fuchsia.
- justapassenger 4y ago
  I don’t know what changes they made in the app layer that runs there, so I’m not making definite judgment. So far I only have correlation, not causation.
  - alophawen 4y ago
    That seems to be enough to bring out the pitch fork for most peopl these days.

philonoist 4y ago

So its clear now no one will be using Dart or Flutter.

refulgentis 4y ago
Opposite, growth exploded.
pjmlp 4y ago
That has been clear since original team left and AdWords managed to keep the remaining ones to avoid going back to GWT. Dart is one trick pony.
- myko 4y ago
  Very confusing to see this considering most mobile developers I know (completely anecdotal) who use cross platform tools have moved from RN to Flutter for myriad reasons.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    A tiny drop in statistics.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  Dart died when Chrome competitors - mostly Mozilla at the time - refused to include another VM in the browser. On the one hand I think it’s a shame because Dart is much better than even the last version of JS. On the other hand wasm and transpiling solved a lot of the issues Dart was trying to solve with less fragmentation so all things considered maybe it was the right decision.
  - cpeterso 4y ago
    > Dart died when Chrome competitors - mostly Mozilla at the time - refused to include another VM in the browser. Chrome didn’t even include the Dart VM. It was only available in special “Dartium” builds because the Chrome team didn’t want it either. https://news.dartlang.org/2012/04/dartium-for-windows-now-available.html https://news.dartlang.org/2012/04/dartium-for-windows-now-av...

anewpersonality 4y ago

Sad to see Fuchsia die and wither like this.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
It's been hyped a lot then killed. Another g project in the grave.
- logicchains 4y ago
  Almost any software project from Google with some kind of user-facing API seems to fail, because Google somehow sucks at API design. Like how awful to use Tensorflow became, leading to it getting largely replaced by PyTorch. Or how complex and convoluted AngularJS was, compared to ReactJS which replaced it. Google's design philosophy seems to be the polar opposite of Linux's "Don't break userspace", so I can see why application developers wouldn't trust a kernel written by them. Dart itself is another example: it started similar to Typescript, but Typescript quickly grew to surpass it in every way. Because Typescript eagerly learned from modern programming language theory, while Dart stuck to Google's "try to make everything like 1990s OO" approach.
  - Tomuus 4y ago
    Platforms. Google sucks at building platforms. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMNmnGgfV/?k=1 https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMNmnGgfV/?k=1
    - anewpersonality 4y ago
      What's this TokTok?

amtamt 4y ago

And what happens to Starnix, the IT consulting company that is first in search results as of now?

klohto 4y ago
That Starnix link is so weak that even 9to5google is second result. What’s up with the obsession that naming needs to be unique? > What is the Starnix IT website? > Searches “Starnix” > Oh no, the first result isn’t what I’m looking for > I’m such a dum dum that I won’t search “Starnix IT” By the way, they have 2 employees.
- bogwog 4y ago
  > What’s up with the obsession that naming needs to be unique? ...lawsuits > By the way, they have 2 employees. What difference does that make?
  - klohto 4y ago
    What? On what basis are you going to sue them? That they have the same name? They don't even have any product.
    - starnix_og 4y ago
      Hey guys. We're a 24 year old consultancy in Toronto. We are very much an active company with a line of products and services. And yes we have more than two employees (not sure where that came from). We've been advocates of free and open source software and active members of the community since the early 90s. We co-founded the non-profit Linux Professional Institute in '99 and are still actively engaged daily with the organization and its mission. Feel free to reach out to our info@ if you'd like to open a dialogue. As for our website, well... that's what you get with a tech company run by tech folks :) -The Starnix Inc team

pphysch 4y ago

> Easily the most ambitious of these is a clear intention for some Fuchsia devices to be able to run apps from other operating systems like Android and Linux. This line is hilarious to me because when SV learned that HarmonyOS could run Android OS/apps, the common refrain was "HarmonyOS is a literal android clone!!!" But when a SV corp does it, it's "ambitious". And one can only imagine the hagiographics if Apple was the one running Android apps natively on iOS... SV needs some deep, deep introspection if it is ever going to get ahead of the curve again.

jeroenhd 4y ago
The difference is that the HarmonyOS API was just a fork of Android, even if the underlying system changed (and it wasn't changed that much). Fuchsia is completely different, from the kernel all the way to the API. The end result isn't what's ambitious. Linux can do this today, and run Windows applications at the same time. What's ambitious is getting different APIs to work together well on a system that's designed radically differently. The overlap lies in Flutter (the "we'll ship our own GUI toolkit with the application code" approach), not in the underlying framework. I imagine Apple could quite easily get Android apps to work on iOS if it wanted to. They need a wrapper for Linux calls, which they can borrow from Google in this case, and they need part of the Android framework, which can be made to run on the wrapper. It wouldn't take more than a year for the first proof of concepts to come out, I'd reckon. Apple just has no reason to want to run Android apps because they're not the ones that are in desperate need of market share like HarmonyOS.
phh 4y ago
Except that HarmonyOS (for smartphones) is actually bog standard Linux/Android? While in this case, they are rewriting the kernel (but I agree that it looks like it'll remain normal Android for the upper layers)

tgv 4y ago

So they were actually putting code in Android for the sake of their own Fuchsia? How did that exactly benefit Android users?

resoluteteeth 4y ago
Presumably it would benefit people using Android in Fuchsia, like how putting drivers for various hypervisors in the linux kernel benefits people who are using linux in those hypervisors.

aaa_aaa 4y ago

Restricted Mode: https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/c/fuchsia/+/688090/6/docs/contribute/governance/rfcs/NNNN_fast_and_efficient_user_space_kernel_emulation.md https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/c/fuchsia/+/688090/6...

ncmncm 4y ago

Based on the Fuchsia code that has been posted on HN, the less of it there is, the better off the world is.