[throwayedidqo]

Fuchsia sounds awesome. Allowing user space processes to do more of their own work frees up the kernel from providing standardized interfaces to hardware.

This makes it significantly easier to build a closed platform with unbreakable barriers between processes, and this is a great thing in terms of security and fine grained access controls for each process. Individual process isolation is extremely important for most of todays use cases where only a single user is logged into each system at one time and most running code is trusted.

In practice this means you can prevent user space processes from accessing anything you don't want them to touch while still giving them substantial low level access. This will be a boon with device makers because it allows them to preventing a users apps from compromising the carrier experience. Companies like Google will also have less concern about users installing malware like ad blockers. The movie and music industry will also greatly appreciate an operating system finally designed for 21st century IP protection. This will even be embraced by hardware manufacturers since they no longer need to provide open source drivers for their hardware that could be ported to other platforms. Overall a win-win for everybody.

In the end we can trust that this will result in a better user experience with more secure apps and devices.

Did anyone hear the whispers of Xooglers a few years back talking about "big changes" coming to Android that were absolutely horrible for users and done to placate industry? Hmmmm... This Fuscia thing looks pretty suspicious.

[gkya]

This is a complete misunderstanding/misrepresentation of what a microkernel is. Even GNU is developing their own microkernel, the HURD.

[throwayedidqo]

I may be overly paranoid, but the majority of what Fuscia is trying to accomplish is extremely bad for open platforms.

The outcome of moving drivers to user space will be proliferation of binary blobs and black box drivers. If you think binary GPU drivers are bad now, imagine an "open source" OS where every single driver is a binary blob. It will become impossible to run Fuscia devices on any other operating system because you have no drivers, sealing off the Android platform permanently.

[snvzz]

>If you think binary GPU drivers are bad now, imagine an "open source" OS where every single driver is a binary blob.

The current situation is they're tied to a version of the kernel, and typically abandoned by the vendors. With userspace drivers and driver APIs, the "android upgrade problem" would be solved.

It'd then be a matter of reversing these drivers, which should be far easier when they're running in userspace and completely bounded.