Comparing Fuchsia components and Linux containers [video]

I worked on Fuchsia engprod for a while. I am still employed at Google and can't talk about anything that isn't publicly available already (which really means anything gleaned from commits to the Git repo).

I think the best way to look at it is like any software: there's Fuchsia The Artifact (thing that is made) and Fuchsia The Product (how thing is used, and how widely). I don't know anything about operating systems, but my understanding is that the engineers are very happy with Fuchsia The Artifact. Fuchsia The Product has had some wandering in the wilderness years.

You got the high drama stories with the timelines re-arranged to fit the narrative :D

Fuchsias underlying goals are to be a great platform for computing. This is distilled in its current incantation into a short tagline on fuchsia.dev: simple, secure, updatable, performant.

The details of how when and where Fuchsia might fit / gets exercised are nuanced and far more often about other factors than those which make great stories. Maybe there will be some of the good stories told one day, but that'll need someone from the team to finish a book and take it through the Google process to publish :D

In the meantime, here's Chris interview: https://9to5google.com/2022/08/30/fuchsia-director-interview...

> Fuchsia pivoted to Nest devices, and a story of replacing just the kernel of Android, to reduce the conflict with the Android team

This is like a textbook example of weak leadership of an executive team.

The power jockeying of a fiefdom’s chieftain (power reduction mitigation in this case) is allowed to drive the organizational structure and product strategy.

That’s a narrative I’ve heard before, and there’s probably some truth to it.

There’s the product side, and there’s the technical side. I’m not sure what qualifies as “senior leadership,” but when a VP finally stepped into the org, all the ambitious product ideas were cut, and we landed on Nest as a product. Until then, I believe it was mostly courtship and sales pitches (I wasn’t in the room).

Apologies if this comes across as harsh, but Fuchsia always seemed to suffer from poor product judgment. I think it’s only healthy to acknowledge that. That said, it’s not entirely surprising—good product people don’t tend to stay very long at Google.

Yes, there was a mobile shell briefly. There was also a desktop shell. I think the narrative you’re describing could be better framed as a series of attempts and experiments to see if Fuchsia could find a use case and client. That doesn’t necessarily mean there was a concrete plan that was seriously contended or scrutinized.

Just to clarify, these are my personal opinions and observations. I don’t actually know what went on behind closed doors, but I’m not sure it’s all that useful to know either, for the reasons I mentioned above.

Yeah the "was never meant to replace" here sounds exactly like the placation we got with wasm - "it's not meant to replace JavaScript" (it totally is).

They did say:

> One big challenge it addresses is Linux’s driver problem

Android devices have been plagued with vendors having out-of-tree device drivers that compile for linux 3.x, but not 4.x or 5.x, and so the phone is unable to update to a new major android version wit ha new linux kernel.

A micro-kernel with a clearly defined device driver API would mean that Google could update the kernel and android version, while continuing to let old device drivers work without update.

That's consistently been one of the motivating factors cited, and linux's monolithic design, where the internal driver API has never been anything close to stable, will not solve that problem.

I think the reasons have probably changed over time, but my recollection is mostly to have a stable Windows-style driver API so that kernel and drivers can be maintained separately. Making such an API on top of Linux was prototyped, but was unsuccessful.

(Historically, that's one big reason that there's lots of Android phones that get a fork of whatever release was current some months before they shipped, and never get substantial updates.)

I'm sure there's technical reasons, but from Google's perspective, one benefit has got to be the non-copyleft license.

The goal is to make devices more controlled by google and less FOSS. The many GPL violations happening around drivers are telling.

The reasons are pretty obvious IMO:

1. Control. It's pretty awkward if your main product depends on an open source community who might say "no" (or "fuck off you worthless imbecile") to half the things you want. You'll end up with a fork (they did!) which has serious downsides.

2. Stable driver ABI.

3. Modern security design. A microkernel, and Rust is used extensively.

Google kind of does this with Android. Most of the magic sauce for a lot of hardware is in user space -

https://siliconsignals.io/blog/implementing-custom-hardware-...

That's why you used to not touch vendor partition when flashing a custom ROM etc..

It is more moonshot to design an API while Linux devs are constantly pulling the rug under.

Microkernels provide nice secure API boundaries and optimizations to reduce performance impact when crossing them on modern CPUs.

The monolithic design forces you to stay in either user or kernel mode as much as possible to not lose performance. Adding the API and ABI incompatibility makes it near impossible to maintain.

It will require a hard fork of Linux, which won't be Linux anymore. Monolithic design is the artifact of low-register-count CPUs of the past. If you are going to create a hard fork of a kernel, why not use a more modern design anyway?

Yes. If you want a nice, secure driver model, a greenfield project is much easier.

Maybe one could run a Fuchsia-like thing inside Linux and use Linux to provide the Linux userland ABI, but that might be challenging to maintain.

Was it what project treble was about? https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes...

Because they get the bonus of no GPL and owning the copyright as a bonus with Fuchsia.

FUD for who?

Feels like a quirk that some of its originators are open source hackers that ended up with Fuchsia being published externally at all. Google definitely doesn't want to attract more killedbygoogle headlines for its experimental projects, and I haven't seen any public Fuchsia evangelization.

If your target platforms are your own smart displays and maybe replacing the Linux kernel in a stack that already doesn't use the Linux userspace, why would you want to spend effort supporting third parties while you're still working on fundamentals?

Coincidentally, Android ABI is a scaffolding on *BSD by the way of bionic.

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/bionic/ (cf. "What's in libc") / https://github.com/GrapheneOS/platform_bionic/tree/15/docs

How would that help? Someone still has to write drivers for devices.

This is why Linux works and is good and most other kernels are slow and don't work. Linux has been optimised over the years based on how software actually works rather than fantasies about how it would work it we got to rewrite the world.

Yes. And without over stating it, iOS is an amazingly robust, very secure OS. it has high trust and low trust models, a secure zone, special purpose hardware and an operating system designed around minimum access rights models which manages to keep going, despite app authors worst intentions.

At one level, it proves the model. The shame is that Mach otherwise has kind of not taken off. Gnu the OS was going to be Mach at the core, at one point IIRC

They are running on Google's Nest Hub devices[0], so I guess this counts as a release?

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/18/22630245/google-fuchsia-o...

I think the problem is that "lack of public information about their future plans" is hard to differentiate from "no future plans exist". For a company that's in the past been known for their willingness to go for low-likelihood but high impact "moonshot" projects and seemingly open with some of their long-term plans (like everyone knowing that they were working on self-driving cars years before self-driving became a topic that people wouldn't be shocked to hear, like, their grandparents talking about), it's honestly pretty weird that the only device they've shipped with it was the Nest Hub, which apparently used to run on the same thing as a Chromcast (so which I don't even think was ChromeOS?).

If this were something that they were planning on using mainly for internal stuff, like for some sort of competitive advantage in data centers or something, I could understand the radio silence on future plans, but it's hard for me to imagine that's their main purpose when they're publicly putting it on stuff like the Nest Hub and Chromebooks (they didn't sell any with it afaik, but they published a guide for putting it on them). It really feels like they just don't know exactly what to do with it, and they're trying to figure that out as well. As for ChromeOS and Android, those already feel like a pretty good example of them not having a super clear initial product strategy for how they overlap (and more important, how they _don't_), so while having some sort of consolidation would make sense, it's not clear to me how Fuschia would help with that rather than just make things even murkier if they start pushing it more. I'd expect that consolidating them would start with the lower-level components rather than the UI, and my understanding is that Fuschia (as opposed to Zircon, which is the kernel) has quite a lot of UI-related stuff in it specifically with Flutter. I'm not saying you're wrong, since it sounds like you might have more relevant knowledge than me, but I can't help but wonder how much of this has really been planned in the long term rather than just been played by ear by those with decision-making power.

> The fact that they are now starting to talk about it publicly now is probably a sign that they are looking to move beyond just IoT in the future.

You're reading too much into a conference presentation.

The team has been allowed to make conference presentations for many years, it's just that most folks haven't wanted to put in the personal effort. A few have in the past, one I know of was Petr: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYaqzEbU0Vk

There used to be patches in AOSP for Fuchsia but they all got reverted a couple years ago. I believe Starnix is the new strategy to get Android working on Fuchsia, if they are going to try for it.

This is a potpourri of stuff over 7 years, sprinkled on a base of confirmation bias re: the common wisdom has a "perception...completely made up out of thin air", and a misunderstanding that speaking publicly in this individual talk represents a step change or something new.

I would bet, very, very, many dollars it is not coming to Android in any form, Starnix isn't coming soon if ever, and they're not looking to move beyond IoT. Long story short, it shipped on the Nest Hub, didn't get a great rep, and Nest Hubs haven't been touched in years because they're not exactly a profit center.

Meanwhile, observe Pixel Tablet release in smart display factor, Chrome OS being merged with Android, and the software-minded VP who championed the need for the project, moving on, replaced by the hardware VP.

When you mash all that together, what you get is: the future is Android. Or, there is no future. Depending on how you look at it.

(disclaimer: former Googler on Pixel team, all derivable from open source info. I wish it wasn't the case, but it is :/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/big-layoffs-at-googl... https://9to5google.com/2023/07/25/google-abandons-assistant-... https://9to5google.com/2024/11/18/chrome-os-migrating-androi..., note 7d views on starnix bugs, all 1 or 0, with the exception of a 7 and 4 https://issues.fuchsia.dev/issues?q=status:open%20componenti...)

Fuchsia may not be outright dead, but it's definitely on life support and would've been killed a long time ago if senior people at Google weren't personally backing it. It had great foundations but without a concrete use case or product development was constantly pulled in different directions. It seemed like every year a new niche for Fuchsia was on the horizon, 6 months of development time would be dedicated to it, an extremely hacky demo would get the public hyped up, and then the whole thing would be abandoned because it didn't make any business sense. Starnix, for example, has been completely deprecated. There was even a newer system to replace it which also got cancelled.

* My knowledge is a couple years old at this point and I haven't kept up with recent developments so maybe the future is brighter than I think.

There were 25 changes updated on the Fuchsia Gerrit in the last 15 minutes. It is much less dead than 99% of open source software projects.

This is completely made up bullshit masquerading as a fact.

It's a lot like sandstorm; the web hosting platform that Kenon Varda created. It failed as a corporation, but is still open source. It's a shame: it was before it's time and still holds up incredibly well.

Sure, but it is allowed, at least as far as I understand, to phone home if it otherwise needs network access. In practice it’s really hard to prevent unauthorized semantic network access once you allow any network access.

The main benefit is that kernel space is drastically smaller which means that the opportunity for a kernel-level exploit is minimal vs something like the Linux kernel that a single device exploit compromises your entire machine.

Sounds like it has just AppArmor/Seccomp/SELinux policies built in. You usually reach the same with previous.

Is it similar to NixOS? Recent convert, would be interested to read a comparison to fuchsia from someone in the know of both.

If it’s anywhere close Google might be sat on a huge opportunity to tread the same ground while solving the ergonomic issues that NixOS has. (I’ve never been more happy with a distro, but I’ll admit it took me months to crack)

I remember reading the fuchsia slide deck and being absolutely flabbergasted at the levels of architecture astronautics going on in it. It kept flipping back and forth between some generic PM desire ("users should be able to see notifications on both their phone and their tablet!") to some ridiculous overcomplication ("all disk access should happen via a content-addressable filesystem that's transparently synchronized across every device the user owns").

The slide with all of the "1.0s" shipped by the Fuchsia team did not inspire confidence, as someone who was still regularly cleaning up the messes left by a few select members, a decade later.

Driver instability is hardly a feature

Hasn't this project been running for (checks notes) almost ten years now? Isn't that enough runway to determine that it's never going to replace AOSP at this rate?

Android is very unapologetically Linux and it's unlikely anyone seriously proposed doing anything other than use Linux.

Fuchsia more likely was for all the stuff that Google kept experimenting with using Android just because it was there rather than because it was a good fit - wearables, IoT, AR/VR, Auto, etc...