The memory model is similar (a flat, linear address space). The OS APIs are quite different. Fuchsia's OS APIs are designed around an object-capability discipline. For example, almost all the syscalls take a zx_handle_t as their first argument, which means they are operations on an object the process has previously been granted access explicitly. In Linux, many OS APIs operate on the "ambient" environment rather than on a specific kernel object.

Disclosure: I work on Fuchsia.

If they do, they are likely a google engineer.

... aaand a Google engineer showed up to answer the question. The beauty of HN :)

It's all fun and games until I have to learn about Zircon to control the software running on hardware I "own".

Not really, you can be a microkernel hobbyist or just curious. I've had some idea of how Zirkon (Fuschia's microkernel) worked for about a year now, and I'm very much in the above categories.

You may be an atypical case. Are you working in anything microkernel related?

No.

It's fairly different; the OS is built on capabilities and exposing its system API via libc. By default applications get nothing. Resources are objects. IPC is done using a wire format called FIDL.

What does FIDl bring over d-bus or say mojo ?

This covers some of that. https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/docs/+/refs/heads/sandbox/j...

Fuchsia's not a real thing and it's never going to be. You don't have to worry about it, it's just a make-work project for some people at google to feel cool.

More likely, Google have done threat modelling of their entire business and worked out that if there was ever some legal problem with using Linux (like the infamous SCO case), the amount of economic damage it would do to them would be more than whatever resources they are spending on coming up with an alternative (which will hopefully never need to be used).

Also, just as Chrome gave them a seat at the table of web standardisation, and a chance to try new ideas that didn't have to go through Mozilla's approval process, having a kernel of their own allows them to influence the OS design space in ways that are more aligned to their business goals, and without needing Linus's approval.

They can use BSD to build whatever they want if they're worried about the GPL.

I think that someone at google built fuschia for the sake of building it. Their core business is still search, that's all Android is. If they launch their own fuschia based handset, people are unlikely to switch, OEMs are unlikely to switch. It's just a failed concept.

See some of the sibling comments, fuchsia is BSD-licensed and has a new design not based on any Unix.

I'm talking about BSD the operating system concerning the OP's assertion of managing risk.

Last I checked (years ago), the userspace was implemented partially with musl, which reads

> 'musl, pronounced like the word "mussel", is an MIT-licensed implementation of the standard C library targetting the Linux syscall API,

Now, they're announcing running Linux programs on Fuchsia. Sure seems to me they're implementing a Unix-like system, even if their kernel was written from scratch.

The BSD world doesn't consider the userspace very separate from the kernel space, it's all part of a single system.

I would argue it's very much 'based on Unix' as soon as they start adding POSIX APIs. They're adding POSIX APIs because they work.

They're using a fork of musl for compatibility that omits some things: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/system/libc

>Fuchsia does not require that programs use libc's ABI. Programs are free to use their own libc, or to do without.

As has been said in other comments, it's not much different from Wine or Linux emulation in FreeBSD.

I can take it from your username that you feel that Fuchsia is a threat to your beloved Linux Desktop to the point of having complete denial that the project is not real. It’s OK to be scared.

But I’m afraid you have to someday accept that some of Big Tech is ‘using’ Linux as a stop gap to either create their own proprietary subsystems around it or a completely new OS compatible with Android for which they pretend ‘they care’ about Linux.

They only care if it’s only for their interests as we can evidently see for Fuchsia Android support and WSL2 GPU hardware acceleration support.

Google has been using Linux since before it was Google, since before it was cool to use Linux on the server. They pioneered it.

Nice history rewrite going on there.

Just the opposite. I don't think Fuchsia is much of anything at all, let alone a threat.

As far as Big Tech, EEE is a legitimate concern.

As far as Google, they've demonstrated countless times they're not to be trusted. If someone does business with them, they are being foolish. Fortunately, outside of search and chrome, they're not very competent, so they're not much of a threat.

I’m not sure how you can argue Fuchsia isn’t much of anything at all considering it’s mostly open source, you can see it’s development, and has came a long way since it was announced. You don’t want it to be much of anything but it is very real.

The amount of human resources dedicated toward improving Linux is order of magnitude higher than the amount of devs working of fuschia. That + the fact that Linux is actively improved since decades. It's quite obvious it's dead on arrival to anybody that allocate a few neurons to the economics question.

People would have said the same thing about Linux compared to proprietary Unix or even early Windows in 1993-1994. Also Linux has millions of lines of legacy that people are having to maintain and work around while Fuchsia and their team gets to start from scratch with all the knowledge learned.

As to your ad hominem in the end there, perhaps you should learn to engage with a level of respect presented to you by your peers, as it is that kind of discourse does little but put on display how your harsh words are little more than a projection. A better type of conservation is expected here.

People would have said the same thing about Linux compared to proprietary Unix or even early Windows in 1993-1994. I don't think the comparison apply, linux had a unique value proposition at the time by being welcoming for opensource and free. Fuschia in comparison is redundant the same way BSDs are nowadays.

Also Linux has millions of lines of legacy that people are having to maintain and work around This claim lacks concrete evidence. The number of lines of code that are here for legacy reasons is unknown but 1 million since like an exageration. More importantly, most of legacy code is confined (does not affect non legacy code). Of course linux because of backwards compatibility has many suboptimalities and developer productivity could be higher without it, but this argument isn't enough to outweight the order of magnitude difference in human resources (and expertise (hardware makers))

with all the knowledge learned All? I think most of the fuschia devs had no significant role in the Linux kernel codebase, it's not like they had hired Greg kroah-hartman. But essentially, fuschia has not access to useful knowledge that is only encoded as comments in the Linux kernel. And the knowledge about past mistakes is lost unless you spend years reading the linux mailing lists and commit history.

Hence the economics point still stand, of course a world without my ad hominem would be better, but such an hypothetical world is precluded for as long as a community like HN is unable to see such striking NIH issues.

Fuchsia isn’t redundant because the literal king of the internet is putting its weight behind it, so you’re economics point doesn’t just not stand, it’s almost a fallacy.

As for the point about Fuchsia not having knowledge because they didn’t personally build Linux, that isn’t my point. What I’m saying is that they can look at what Linux (and other OS’s) have done and skip over lots of pathways that have been proven over the last three decades to be dead ends or inefficient, while mimicking those systems and conventions that are proven to work. I’m sorry but you seem to be going out of your way to ignore the fact that Fuchsia is, whether or not you want it to be or think it should or will be.

What is an EEE? I am having trouble determining the meaning from context and I am having trouble searching for it.

I believe they're referring to the phrase "embrace, extend, extinguish":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extin...

There are products already shipped that run fuchsia afaik.

I think you're thinking of Flutter, which powers the Nest Hub (or so I heard). I don't think they ship anything with Fuchsia yet.