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Comment by PoignardAzur | Hacker News Reader

Well, they say it's not intended to be an Android replacement, but I'm persuaded it's intended to be an Android replacement.

The main advantages over Linux are a clean room design, better security-by-design (having a microkernel means the attack surface is way smaller, capabilities means sandboxing-as-a-security-mechanism becomes possible), and more control over the project.

Honestly, I think the other commenters are being way too cynical about this. If this project gains traction, even if Google goes evil with it, forks and community distributions could still happen like they do for Linux, and be immensely beneficial. The sandboxing alone is a huge benefit.

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Android already has a sandboxing-first design. Every app runs in its own sandbox done via different Linux users. It's a bit crude to use a different user per application, but it's effective & robust.

Android is also pretty unapologetically POSIX/Linux and doesn't shy away from exposing that to applications (eg https://developer.android.com/reference/android/system/Os ). So I don't think Fuchsia would replace the Linux kernel in Android. It'd have to be far more rewarding a migration to justify the massive ecosystem breakages that would result (for both apps & OEMS)

Windows XP proved you can do it, but that at least came with a massive (real world) improvement to things like security & stability that were appreciable upgrades to end users.

> It's a bit crude to use a different user per application, but it's effective & robust.

This is how I run services on my home server. Plex runs in a rootless container under user plex for example.

IMHO Fuchsia will be a massive (real world) improvement over Linux in security.

Also, 5 or 7 years from now, on which OS will Chrome or Chromium run better? Fuchsia or Linux?

For the past 12 months, I've been running Chrome "on Wayland" (without XWayland in between) and although it is definitely usable, there are many small bugs some of which has existed the entire 12 months.

(And will Firefox even be maintained 5 to 7 years from now?)

> IMHO Fuchsia will be a massive (real world) improvement over Linux in security.

Exploits in the Linux kernel are very few & far between. How would Fuchsia represent a massive (real world) improvement in Linux over something that basically doesn't happen?

By contrast for the Windows 9x -> NT kernel transition, the 9x kernel (in Windows ME at the time) had rampant worm issues and was notoriously unstable in very significant & practical ways, like plugging in USB devices would trigger BSODs with some regularity.

These days the majority of kernels (Windows, Mac, and Linux) have vanishingly few exploits and are for the most part extremely stable. There's not much to improve on at this level.

> For the past 12 months, I've been running Chrome "on Wayland" (without XWayland in between) and although it is definitely usable, there are many small bugs some of which has existed the entire 12 months.

Note that neither ChromeOS nor Android use Wayland or X11. That compositor fight that desktop Linux can't move on from isn't something that plagues anybody else, so there's nothing for Fuchsia to "fix" there.

AFAIK, exploits for linux don't typically happen in core linux code, but rather in the drivers.

That's what fuchsia bullet proofs. Drivers are isolated from the kernel such that an exploitable driver doesn't also give the exploit root access.

Sure but even still exploits in kernel modules are also extremely rare. The vast majority of exploits are in getting userspace to do something it has permission to do but in a way that it didn't want to do it. Sandboxing & permission systems help here tremendously, which Android already has a pretty robust & extensive system (not just the normal app permissions, but also a massive set of selinux policies controlling what a given system service can do).

Desktop Linux is pretty far behind the curve at this point, but Android/iOS aren't (and increasingly MacOS/Windows are fixing things up)

Fuchsia seems like it'd be an incremental improvement here at best, and "real world" improvements even less clear than that.

> Exploits in the Linux kernel are very few & far between.

That's an interesting take on multiple code execution bugs per year. And not via drivers, but userland-exploitable code in general subsystems.

Unless you're referring to remote code execution, which in the era of ubiquitous web applications (often running involuntarily through advertisements, etc) seems like a distinction without a difference.

> And not via drivers, but userland-exploitable code in general subsystems.

We're exclusively talking about the kernel+drivers here. User land exploits are irrelevant (and obviously not something fuchsia will be immune to).

> Unless you're referring to remote code execution

I'm referring to exploits that actually are found in the wild to have caused damage that a change in kernels would have done something to prevent.

Drivers are the commercial case for Fuschia. But in general, microkernels make it much easier to 1) implement privilege isolation for subsystems and 2) implement subsystems in a more secure manner, both of which absolutely improve security posture. A subsystem is just another type of driver. Though, it depends on how well Zircon makes use of this--i.e. avoids implementing all the most critical subsystems in the same process, or otherwise abuses too much unprotected memory sharing among them.

> 1) implement privilege isolation for subsystems and 2) implement subsystems in a more secure manner, both of which absolutely improve security posture.

Sure, but Android already has that via a user per application for app sandboxing & a very extensive selinux policy set[1]. Which makes the real-world benefit of that seemingly very negligible. There's a huge gap between desktop Linux & Fuschia/Zircon here, but there doesn't seem to be a particularly big gap between Fuschia/Zircon & Android Linux.

1: See all the .te files in the public & prive dirs of https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/+/maste...

Firefox stems from mozilla back in 1998 only 5 years after Mosiac and 3 years after the original IE. It seems exceptionally likely that Firefox will continue in some form for the foreseeable future.

> And will Firefox even be maintained 5 to 7 years from now?

Hopefully! It would be a bummer to have to switch to some hipster browser like Suckless Surf (assuming browsers made by advertising companies are not candidates for obvious reasons).

> Also, 5 or 7 years from now, on which OS will Chrome or Chromium run better? Fuchsia or Linux?

Linux's GUI layer is such a huge weak spot, and it doesn't look like Wayland's gonna fix that (it seems like it's not even set up to address the most serious problems, really).

If they put Fuschia on Android devices & Chromebooks, that'll be about the end of the story for consumer-facing Linux. Then if they can make it work well as a container-hosting server OS and decide to push it for that purpose... well, the year of the Linux anything might be behind us, then.

Neither ChromeOS nor Android use any desktop Linux software such as X, Wayland, Gnome, KDE, or otherwise. As far as I know Chrome still runs fine on Desktop Linux despite this.

> So I don't think Fuchsia would replace the Linux kernel in Android.

How hard would it be to add a posix subsystem to Fucshia?

My outsider opinion is that the Oracle lawsuit increased motivation for alternatives to Java (the language), and Google decided to put more wood behind the Dart/Fuchsia arrow.

It's already in development:

https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/contribute/governance/rfcs/0...

With an explicit call-out for running Android apps, no less!

What google is trying to do here is equivalent to getting everyone to switch from IPv4 to IPv6. Yes, it's superior. Yes, there'd be massive benefits. Yes, it isn't likely that google will go super evil.

However, google isn't the only player in this. They need to get all their vendors to rewrite drivers for their new kernels. They'd also need everyone using android, for example, to get on board writing drivers.

Meanwhile, one of the largest players, samsung, is looking at making their own OS.

For an already fractured ecosystem, it just doesn't seem like it's something that can be successfully pulled off. Maybe if google/android was more like apple it'd be doable. But not where there are so many players that need to be brought in the mix.

I agree - I think only a company with pockets as deep as Google could pull off creating a brand new operating system in today's world. I'm curious to see what comes of it.

I agree with the premise, although I disagree that only Google could do this. Honestly there are a low number, but greater than one, entities that could do this. Microsoft is an obvious one, for instance.

That said, to your bigger point -- I think the way to pull off a brand new OS in today's world is to write something that scratches an itch that a small-ish group of people have. Do it well enough, and it will grow into something bigger. In fact this is exactly how Linux got going. It will work again, guaranteed.

I would actually love to see a full, from-scratch rewrite of Windows. I'm not sure if it's ever been done before, but it definitely feels like it hasn't.

You might be interested in ReactOS[1]. Their objective is to make a 100% FOSS Windows Compatible OS, including drivers.

Currently, they're at around ~WinXP level support

[1]: https://reactos.org/

Well, Windows NT was that.

It was even on the verge of being a microkernel and it could run a super light weight virtualization (for the lack of a better word) system: OS personas.

It would be interesting to get Windows NT NextGen, true.

and no GPL... which google is very hostile to GPL so that alone would be a reason to replace Linux

Personally I think they have grander visions than just Android.

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