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Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

Soo, given that all important device drivers in the Linux kernel used in Android are closed, I'd be curious to hear from Google if their new Fuchsia is going to solve that problem.

This may seem trivial, but closed device drivers make 100% impossible neither to update them to more modern versions once the Android version is declared obsolete, nor install natively a different operating system on the device. This practice, security concerns aside, is responsible for a huge load of old -otherwise perfectly usable- devices being scrapped in landfills.

So, dear Google, will you keep the lowest, smallest but most important layers of the OS open or rather will prevent people to do what they want with the devices they purchased even at the cost of contributing to more pollution?

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Google does not regard closed drivers as a problem. With Fuchsia, all the important drivers will be closed, full stop. Google has no incentive to care about your landfills. The permissive license of Fuchsia will make its ecosystem more appealing to IVI and mobile OEMs, not less.

E-waste is just one of the problems, probably the only one most users could understand; but security is also a huge one. With apps requiring permission to essentially everything (and users surrendering them blindly) security on any mobile device as of today is a myth. Open Source apps could mitigate the problem by swapping an unreliable layer with a trustworthy one, but we still have closed device drivers which could contain whatever their manufacturer (or its government) wants without any chance of being audited.

If the device drivers are stuffed into user space using stable ABIs, it would be easy to update the OS while leaving the driver alone. That can even be done with kernel drivers. I believe that Windows does it. The reason that cannot be done on Linux is that Linux elected not to have a stable driver ABI.

I'm not familiar with driver development, but could it be possible to rewrite a driver's machine code so that all interactions with the kernel are redirected through a translation layer that emulates the old kernel's ABI using the new kernel?

I think it would be almost impossible

http://wiki.c2.com/?SufficientlySmartCompiler

My understanding is that Fuchsia will have a stable ABI to avoid the driver issues of Android/Linux. That's not an answer to open source drivers of course. That falls on the OEMs.

I also don't approve of the wasteful short lifecycles, however I don't think they are only caused by device drivers being closed source. People want to buy new devices, not only because of the outdated software, but also because the hardware has improved so much in the last years, and because they enjoy buying.

That is absolutely true, especially in "western" richer countries, but don't forget other poorer places where most people don't feel the need to get the latest gimmick to climb the social ladder by impressing friends, but rather to communicate in the cheapest possible way.

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