> But modules could still (and can still) crash the kernel and the drivers don't necessarily have a particularly stable interface.
> Android really has its hands tied here by what Linux does. You may agree or disagree with that but the above is a view held by influential people within Fuchsia.
I don't really think driver robustness is an issue here. The number of phones I've seen, used or heard about with driver problems is zero.
Add in the fact that phones are almost never rebooted (compared to desktops/laptops and other computers), and the driver situation looks incredibly stable.
Manufacturers keep stats of the number of kernel panics per year.
I was disappointed to find that on many models of phone, there was not a single active user who had not experienced at least one random reboot caused by a kernel panic a year after purchase.
The fact it boots straight back up to the lockscreen means many users will never notice that it's happened though.
> I was disappointed to find that on many models of phone, there was not a single active user who had not experienced at least one random reboot caused by a kernel panic a year after purchase.
The actual stats here will help; across a few million devices, random reboots unrelated to software or drivers will be expected.
You're saying that, one some models, the device never crashed. On others, there was at least one crash. That's at least a 0.00001% crash rate. That's unbelievably good. At that rate it's probably a hardware error, not a driver error.
If you used a different threshold we'd have a better idea - how many models have a crash rate of 10%? 5%?
> The fact it boots straight back up to the lockscreen means many users will never notice that it's happened though.
That provides further evidence that the money being poured into a new kernel to alleviate a problem that happens so rarely it can't be distinguished from statistical noise, and when it does happen, is almost never noticed by the user, is money being wasted.
The return here is not proportionate to the problem being experienced, and the solution is definitely not proportionate to the money being spent.
> You're saying that, one some models, the device never crashed
For at least one user, yes.
But there are many users who maybe only turn the phone on 5 minutes a day to check messages - so it isn't really odd for a few users to never see a crash.
> But there are many users who maybe only turn the phone on 5 minutes a day to check messages - so it isn't really odd for a few users to never see a crash.
I don't really know anyone who uses their smartphone for less than 5m per day, but that's irrelevant anyway.
The question is still: is the money being put into preventing this problem at all proportionate to the size of the problem?
If there's a problem that no one notices[1], is a solution really worth spending millions of dollars per year over five years?
[1] So few users complained about this it's not even a statistical rounding error.
> Android really has its hands tied here by what Linux does. You may agree or disagree with that but the above is a view held by influential people within Fuchsia.
I don't really think driver robustness is an issue here. The number of phones I've seen, used or heard about with driver problems is zero.
Add in the fact that phones are almost never rebooted (compared to desktops/laptops and other computers), and the driver situation looks incredibly stable.