None of this changes that the rollout for these things could be done incrementally in parallel with the existing Linux based platforms, with an eye to produce shared components whenever possible instead of rewriting the world. The Fuchsia folks were notorious for their obsession with purity of essence, and because they had the headcount and $$, they just did what they wanted.
Were I to guess, the prime motivation for Fuchsia would be to have a phone or IoT device which could regularly receive kernel updates without needing hardware vendor interaction. That's the biggest sore spot for linux. (not that I think Fuchsia's kernel would require a bunch of updates due to how simple it is).
This is an outsider's perspective. Definitely a big expensive project that reminds me of other big expensive google projects which seem DoA.
How does the lack of hardware vendor cooperation get improved by moving the problem into userspace?
You still need/want the hardware vendors to create drivers and update them, which they frequently don't.
I guess it's better because you're just going to be content with binary blobs?
And yeah I think you're pretty on about the driver/vendor comment.
From the outside looking in I thought the security model could really help Google lower splash radius from zero days? The feature-set certainly sounds appealing just reading the marketing blurb. [1]
With any luck in the next iteration Google will create a Fuschia ISO or VMDK so people who want to give it a spin without building it can quickly get a taste of the environment. The fact you can at least run it in an emulator is definitely a step up from requiring dedicated hardware, which was the previous process. [2]
[1] https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/principles/secure [2] https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/development/hardware/paving
How can they solve that with software? It's an incentive/economic problem. Hardware vendors don't want to play nice, there's no incentive for them. It's better if they're jerks and never release their stuff or do it years after their hardware stops being relevant.
Now if they have Microsoft/apple level os penetration you can be damn sure it's gonna be only serving google search. Just to ensure/build more moat aroing Google search can justify infinite cost
Unless they want to do crazy things like sell to the EU market, in which case they're back to having to offer multiple search engines.
IBM has, what a half dozen between mainframes and AIX and older ones?
Apple has their own OS of course.
Microsoft of course.
Facebook? Netflix? Amazon? Such second-rate "tech" companies, tsk tsk.
After years in this industry and seeing so many things like this just fail, my perspective is that the "right" way to do it (rewrites/replatforms) is build shared components and have teams that deploy to both and so live in both worlds.
This way the old gets the new, and the new has to live and breathe the reasons for the compromises that the old lived through the first time. And you don't end up with a "legacy" team and a "future" team.
Example: I tried (a bit half-heartedly and I was low-status so nobody cared) to pitch that we write a new screenreader for Home Hub rather than brutally kludging in the one from ChromeOS. A new screenreader that could be shared with Fuchsia, as they were writing one from scratch. If building from scratch why not build one as a component that can be shared? That approach was seen as a total non-starter by the people I talked to. Fuchsia got to write their shiny new thing basically in isolation and barely interacted with us poor folk who had to keep maintaining the actual-existing screenreader deployed on several million devices in people's homes. Mainly fell to my friend/coworker who was a hero.
BTW we both quit the same day.
https://cs.opensource.google/fuchsia/fuchsia/+/main:src/ui/a...
My impression when it was announced was it started as a really neat personal project by some long-time OS development nerds (I mean that in a good way) that then escaped the gates and then it became a hammer in search of nails.
It ended up eating the project I was on, and was many many years late in the process of doing so, breaking schedule promise after schedule promise. I kept waiting for management to put a lid on it, but they seemed to have infinite headcount and budget, and patience from mgmt to support their mission to rewrite the world while we struggled to get time and resources to maintain the codebase we already had which was shipped as a profitable product and sitting in millions of people's homes with good reviews.
Google has OS politics dysfunction... especially in hardware devices where there are almost a half dozen Linux distributions fighting it out for marketshare. Fuchsia just added to that craziness.