[native_samples]

I think the more interesting thing here is the fact that so much code in their repository appears to be bit-rotted or half baked, despite being documented. KASLR is mentioned all over the place but doesn't work and the answer is "we know, it's there only to stop it bit-rotting". You need to patch the system to do kernel debugging because otherwise the toolchain hangs. Syscalls are documented as enforcing security rules yet the actual checks are //TODO comments (and they are still willing to assign CVEs so apparently they just forgot?!). The syzcaller tool is advertised as working with Fuschia, yet despite trying multiple different versions he can't even compile them due to API churn. Apparently downloading and executed a binary isn't even an option, despite their vision being that Fuschia is a sea of components downloaded and run from the internet.

It's hard not to feel like maybe Google has lost the ability to develop operating systems. Fuschia has been in development for years now, it has no users outside of Google yet if you flick through their docs you'll notice a whole bunch of pages talking about deprecated components, migrations, etc. When I last looked at their docs, they read like it's been around for 20 years and has millions of apps, even though that's not true. Oh yeah and of course the giant BLM banners everywhere they have/used to have. Just checked, now those banners are replaced with "Honoring Asian Pacific American Heritage Month", lol. Apparently their vision of a futuristic OS is one in which every page in the docs has some random totally US centric bit of virtue signalling in it. No wonder they somehow can't even finish a microkernel, a design that reduces performance in return for a much smaller syscall surface area.

[dec0dedab0de]

It's hard not to feel like maybe Google has lost the ability to develop operating systems.

Did they ever have that ability? I know they did a bunch of work for Android/Chrome OS. But both of those are Linux, have they tried to develop an OS from scratch before fuschia?

[native_samples]

Yes. Android is sufficiently different from a stock Linux distro that it absolutely counts as a unique operating system. ChromeOS is also unique in interesting ways, although less successful. It's certainly a production quality OS.

Perhaps more importantly, both of those are complete and have real users who found value in them.

[kllrnohj]

> ChromeOS is also unique in interesting ways, although less successful.

Chrome OS absolutely dominates the education market. So less successful than Android, sure (but so is literally every other OS at this point), but still very successful.

[pjmlp]

That is an US phenomenon though.

It can be hardly seen in European countries, and I bet other continents are hardly different.

[kllrnohj]

That's just not true. It might not be seen in your particular country, but it's definitely not US centric. Canada, Sweden, and New Zealand are also countries where Chromebooks are sweeping education https://www.neowin.net/news/chromebooks-are-seeing-huge-adop...

And the reasons why are pretty straightforward. Kids can't really mess them up, they are highly sharable (eg laptop carts), they are cheap (generally), and they have centralized management for schools that's otherwise typically limited to enterprise markets.

[pjmlp]

In countries where parents pay for kids computers, and worry about what everyone else is using, they don't get any uptakes.

Before COVID, most schools were still about pen and paper in most European countries, computers are used at home.

[pjmlp]

Android and Chrome OS use the Linux kernel, that is all.

Everything else, including driver subsystem (Android docs even calls classic Linux drivers legacy), doesn't have anything to do with GNU/Linux.

[xmodem]

Or maybe it's just that building a kernel, network stack, etc from scratch, and getting it to the point where it's stable, secure, sufficiently performant, compatible etc, compared to what's already out there is a massive undertaking - microkernel or not - and they just need more time.

Let's not forget that Android didn't even have smooth 60fps scrolling until well into the 2010s.

[staticassertion]

Building an OS takes time, they're doing it incrementally, the bugs were known and even had issues for them already. I wouldn't draw any crazy conclusions from this research, this is a hacker's exploration of a foreign OS, which is very interesting, but isn't something I'd draw judgments from.

[shp0ngle]

I think you are downvoted because you touch on the BLM/Asian Pacific stuff, which tickles people. But yeah you are also very right.

[ignoramous]

Just because they have those banners up doesn't mean those point to some latent reason for whatever is responsible for their woes. Granted it gives a window in to the culture of the Fuschia team at Google, but to me, personally, it doesn't come off as virtue-signalling at all but rather a conscious effort to put diversity and inclusion in the front and center of what they do. As another example, Google has had socio-political doodles for decades, but I never considered those as virtue-signalling.

[jeltz]

To me it comes off as inclusive of Americans while excluding the rest of the world. As a European I do not feel welcome, and I imagine people further from US culture feel even less welcome.

[skavi]

Would you mind going into why these banners make you feel unwelcome? Do you feel similarly about using the US Google homepage?

[jhugo]

Not European, but not American either. It's weird to me whenever popular American (and they're always American) political issues get plastered all over tech documentation.

It feels irrelevant to the purpose of the page, and makes it feel like the page is targeted to people who have a specific viewpoint on a specific political issue (usually an issue that non-Americans have little context for).

[Commodore63]

As a European you are welcome by default. Look around; you are not a persecuted minority.

[native_samples]

It's relevant because it reflects their priorities and how they view developers.

The giant banners say this: although these are technical docs you may need to do your job, the most important thing you must see above all is an announcement of how morally pure we (think we) are. Once isn't enough. On our blog isn't enough. It must be the biggest and most eyecatching thing on literally every single page of our documentation. This indicates a lack of respect for the time and attention of devs. The implementation is also incompetent - the banner text appears to have leaked into search result snippets, thus reducing the utility of their docs search engine.

When Steve Ballmer jumped around on stage yelling "developers! developers! developers!" he was ridiculed because the outburst of energy seemed absurd and out of place for a CEO. But many of us appreciated the sentiment - that if you're developing an operating system then developers matter and their time/attention matters. Ballmer knew that. Platforms aren't chicken/egg situations where it's unclear what comes first. Apps come first. Users come for the apps. Then more apps come to follow those early adopter users, but ultimately, there had to be some apps to kick things off.

When the first thing you see at the top of the Fuschia docs is something totally unrelated to programming / the reason you were at that site, and which is irrelevant to most of the world as well, this sends a powerful message that the Fuschia devs are:

a. Staggeringly US centric. Their mindset isn't international at all. This is offputting to those of us outside the US. Fuschia's front page claims it's "an inclusive, open source effort". Not only have they never even tested it with a non-English locale, but they ignored the critical locale bug for so long other people had to fork the project to even make the emulator start up for non-English users [1]. That's about as non-inclusive as you can get yet is also absolutely predictable. Did we really need the blog to tell us that? Not really, we could guess it quite easily. The sort of people who demand such banners always seem to be hypocrites. It's called virtue signalling for a reason - people who do it announce their principles but never seem to live by them.

b. Not really rewarded for making developers happy. It reinforces a general impression about modern Google, that the personal success of the employees and executives is tied to things like the size of a giant black banner as much as whether their kernel is secure or their API docs are actually accurate.

c. As such extremely likely to manipulate their platform to prioritize the happiness of activists over that of developers. It's a bold statement of ideological allegiance. Who in their right mind is going to write an app for Fuschia that's braver than a shopping cart when they see that? Nobody smart, because you can guess what will happen if Fuschia actually does get apps: half of them will end up banned for some inane, impossible to understand reason, probably related to mundane use of language that's inexplicably become unacceptable since yesterday in California. The financial risk of developing for this platform is huge.

BTW: the Google doodles are pretty political these days, but in the beginning they were mostly reflecting things like national holidays.

[1] https://github.com/assusdan/fuchsia-patches

[skavi]

You’re comment and a sibling both express that these messages are off-putting to international audiences? Why is that?

BLM originated in the US, but black people definitely experience racism elsewhere. The movement is not necessarily US exclusive.

I’ve seen plenty of tech companies with Ukraine banners on their websites, and have not seen a single criticism. Wouldn’t such banners exclude US developers under that logic?

[native_samples]

"I’ve seen plenty of tech companies with Ukraine banners on their websites, and have not seen a single criticism"

The Ukraine banners are dumb. They have no place in technical docs. Like everyone else I want them to win their war, but spamming blue and yellow flags everywhere isn't going to help achieve that. Moreover the murky nature of their military alliances (Azov etc) makes it hardly a Disney movie-esque conflict with pure good and pure evil.

You see no complaints because why bother? The sort of people who do that never care if their actions are unpopular with other people, in fact they take a perverse joy in it.

[Banana699]

>You’re comment and a sibling both express that these messages are off-putting to international audiences?

Non-American distinct from both of them here: They're right.

>black people definitely experience racism elsewhere

Persuambly you think BLM is a generic "Racism Bad" message, so 3 things to say about this

1- BLM is not a generic "Racism Bad" message. It's the name of a movement whose leaders used donor money to accumulate personal wealth. It's the chant used by protestors who burned down homes and stole from people's business. It's the motto that people who write books to argue that disputing a racism accusation is a sign of guilt and fragility. I consider myself a non-racist, and this movement is not the kind of things I support.

2- The kinds of people and media outlets who support BLM tends to be selective and hypocritical. Wouldn't an honest person who shout "BLM" when a black man is killed by a police officer, wouldn't that person also be obligated to shout "White Lives Matter", WLM, when white innocents are killed by a black criminal because of their race ? This last event happens to be a real thing that actually happened (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waukesha_Christmas_parade_atta...), by a self-confessed black terrorist. Searching for "Black Supremacy", the only response in the first page is a short Wikipedia page, the rest is articles talking about White Supremacy instead. I have a feeling things are not so balanced here.

3- Even granting that BLM is a good moral cause to support, how is it relevant to a tech document ? Let us grant the following causes are all worthy of moral solidarity ["Climate Change", "China's Treatment of Uyghur Muslims", "Sexual Harrasment", "Child Abuse", "Animal Cruelty"]. All of the elements of this list are morally abhorrent things to me that I want to prevent or reverse. Now, where and when should I say this? at my home? to each and every one of my friends or family ? at work ? on the street ? Is there any time and place where I can safely lie down and not speak about atrocities, for once?

>I’ve seen plenty of tech companies with Ukraine banners on their websites

I'm very very annoyed by this too. Seeing Github and JetBrains issue a statment about this conflict is the most pathetic, hypocritical and forced thing I have seen in a very long while.

Point 3 above applies to it straightforawrdly with no explanation, point 1 and 2 also apply as follows

1- Pro-Ukraine sentiment isn't a neutral "War Bad" message, it usually encodes within it pretty dubious and very partisan assertions, such as the belief that all Russians are to - and should be - blame and punish for Putin's action, as well as unhealthy and fanatic support for the Ukrainian government and its actions.

2- Tons of countries, everywhere and all the time, have experinced invasions and other illegal military actions. The example off the top of my head is Yemen. Children dying of starvation, civilaians bombed and hospitals wrecked, *Since 2015*. Did any of those companies issue statments then ? Let's forget about the past. Do we have a right to expect those companies to protest every single war and illegal military actions, regardless of the position of US politicians and US foreign policy, in the future?

[skavi]

I do feel that BLM is a worthy cause to support. This is mainly because I feel the movement can be seen separately from any formal organizations or individual people. I understand how you may disagree.

Regardless, the real disagreement seems to be in where it is appropriate to represent the movements you believe in.

Even granting that a technical document page may not be the best place for such advertising, I still do not understand why the presence of these messages would offend an international audience.

If they are truly irrelevant, then surely it should be at worst unsightly?

[ignoramous]

> It's relevant because it reflects their priorities and how they view developers.

Yes, that they constantly think about diversity and inclusion. Though, I agree that encouraging workplace / employee activism is a tricky slippery slope. Companies like coinbase and basecamp eschew it, for instance.

Re: a: You gotta start somewhere. Besides, work to add a banner is probably a one-day / one-week low-hanging fruit, whereas i18n is not. In comparing those, you're comparing something that takes months to deride something that probably took hours to build and ship.

Re: b: Not privvy to today's culture at Google, so can't say for sure other than speculate.

Re: c: You view that as a bad thing. Such markers (drastic measures as it may seem to you) is how any of this changes. As a thought-experiment / deriving example from tech: do you oppose DNS encryption (a drastic measure in many a eyes [0]) because it nullifies existing cheaper surveillance apparatus deployed by schools, corps, governments; or do you embrace it and firmly want Browser and OS vendors to push forward with it?

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/uk-isp-group-names-mozilla-int...

[goodpoint]

> Steve Ballmer ... was ridiculed because the outburst of energy ...

It was much, much worse than that.

Putting aside the crass yelling and dancing; also putting aside any rumor of cocaine abuse; putting aside how cultish it looks...

Having a large crowd of adults yelling "dentists! dentists!" or be it lawyers, accountants, etc in a frenzy would be seen as very unprofessional.

> But many of us appreciated the sentiment

I hope not.

> It's called virtue signalling for a reason - people who do it announce their principles but never seem to live by them

And how do you know that? Some people can be hypocritical, yes.

Are all people with principles hypocritical?

[jimbob45]

>Having a large crowd of adults yelling "dentists! dentists!" or be it lawyers, accountants, etc in a frenzy would be seen as very unprofessional.

If the CEO of a large dental organization has the balls to go on stage and yell, "Hygienists! Hygienists! Hygienists!", it shows that he's willing to prostrate himself to show his commitment to the company he serves. People appreciate that. There are certainly enough CEOs ignoring the needs and desires of their employees sitting inside their ivory towers these days. We don't need more of them.

[Banana699]

>Are all people with principles hypocritical?

I think the issue here is not "People With Principles", but "People With Principles They Are Dying To Tell You About". This makes the standard for judging you much much higher : You not only think those principles are superior to a lot of other competing ones, You not only advocate (sometimes, a lot of times to be honest, obnoxiously) for those principles, You do all of those things in times and places where it doesn't make much sense, and right in the middle of other people who might very well disagree with you to heaven and back on those things but choose to stay silent and cooperate with you on unrelated matters nonetheless, cooperation which you break and impede by loudly and non-ceaseingly declaring views they find disagreeable. This makes the people around you, understandbly, model you as the truest possible expression of an X-ism follower: you're at least as sincere as any other X-ist, so any failings or deviation from you principles you have or do is something that the whole X-ism movement along with all its followers also have or do.

I'm biased against what typical US progressives advocate for, so I will choose one of my own principles to make an example of.

I'm a (still booting up) vegetarian, I try not to eat any meat for ethical reasons. I did manage to successfully banish meat from my food for about 2 years now, but I'm not strong-willed enough yet to stop eating marine life. (Technically this makes me not a vegetarian at all, but the weird-sounding word "Pescetarian", but "vegetarian" is more well known and more in alignment with my mental self-image and future plans.) Now, if I started advocating for vegetarianism very loudly and in every single chance and place I find, not only will this make some people very annoyed, but they will start asking : What sort of life do you lead by following this principle you're very passionate about ? If my life deviates from my principles (and it does), I expect people will be even more annoyed, outraged even, and become resistent to and critical of my advocacy. A similar thing happens with nearly every major religion or religion-like ideology, which vegetarianism and progressivism indeed are.

[tester756]

I think you're attacking weakest points of his comment, tbf.

[goodpoint]

So?