Google’s Fuchsia OS on the Pixelbook: It Works It Actually Works

arstechnica.com

13 points·rbanffy··3 comments

I don't know why but I'm actually less excited about Fuchsia than the old Singularity/Midori. As Joe Duffy said [0] when they worked on Midori they also wrote UI, editors, browsers and many more applications in months so it's not surprising Google engineers also managed that.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k

For me it looks like the classic Not Invented Here syndrome - we already have microkernels, even formally verified ones (seL4) but AFAIK Google didn't want that to "be more flexible".

Using C for kernel also looks like a poor choice nowadays, unless Google has some magic static analysis (for example Singularity/Midori had custom languages with ownership tracking akin to Rust).

Maybe Fuchsia is for bringing microkernel architecture for masses using "boring technology"?

Here's a quick ELI5 style question: what are the implications of Meltdown mitigations on microkernel architectures (vs monolithic designs)?

Singularity used Software Isolated Processes. Basically the apps were distributed as .NET bytecode, compiled by Bartok on the target system to native code. That guaranteed that processes never accessed each other's memory so you wouldn't need regular process isolation.

I haven't thought about the implications to reading kernel memory but it'd be great to see a paper on the subject.

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