clips.txt

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fuchsia/comments/aewu7a/what_can_we_understand_from_fuchsia_architectural/

A subject done a lot of thinking about. So this might get a bit long.

First, I believe Zircon, Fuchsia kernel, is for everything. Not just
smartphones. Or iOT. It is for the cloud to a tiny processor. Plus everything in
between.

It is why we have Machina already. So you can run GNU/Linux on Zircon.

I also believe the number #1 reason for Zircon is to be able to **iterate faster
with hardware**. Because of Dennard scaling we have to look at architecture to get
future efficiencies. Some think of it as Moore's law coming to and end but the
bigger issue is Dennard scaling just not as well known.

Linux is a monolithic kernel. It makes is harder to map the kernel to the
hardware. Zircon enables you to address what is traditionally in the kernel at a
finer granular level and therefore able to innovate and iterate with hardware
more easily. I would expect Zircon to drive a new SoC from Google that uses more
cores.

There are a couple design decisions with Zircon over Linux that are important.
One is I/O being async in terms of the servicing does NOT have to happen on the
same core making the request like it is with Linux. The other is able to service
interrupts from user space. You can do a kludge on Linux with using a VM to get
interrupts handled from user space but that is NOT the same.

What is also clear to me is that Fuchsia is a completely new stack but Google is
also making each layer able to stand on it's own. This is such an interesting
approach. So Flutter is the native UI for Fuchsia but yet it supports Android,
iOS, OS X, WIndows, GNU/Linux, ChromeOS and looks like also web. So it can stand
on its own. Probably the best part is it can be used for a new device very
easily. It makes ZERO sense to develop your own for a new device but instead you
would just use Flutter. Then you just need a canvas. Flutter is a completely
solution. It includes everything.

Zircon is the exact same way. What was very unusual with Linux is that it was
just a kernel. Usually the kernel is part of an OS. IT all goes together. But
Linux was architected so it could be used just as a kernel. Then you create your
own userland.

Zircon is the same way. It can be the kernel for all kinds of things without
using the Fuchsia userland.

Zircon should also get us far better security then Linux. As we can see Linux
has consistently had security issues.

https://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php

Part of the problem is Linux has well over 15 million lines of code and it ALL
runs fully privileged. Zircon is 10s of thousands.

The other aspect of Zircon is that it is designed from the ground up to support
multiple OSs. Like how the Internet is a network of networks. Zircon supports
multiple OSs running at the same time. It is done as a first class primitive in
a kernel that prides itself on few syscalls.

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/zircon/+/HEAD/docs/syscalls.md

Basically both VMs and containers first class primitives. Containers it is built
in from the ground up and beyond even syscalls.

Everything is a container in Zircon. You can NOT use containers in a way.