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> Fuchsia's driver handling is superior to what you get with linux. Because pretty much everything is pushed into userspace it makes it dead simple to keep a driver going forever.

How does the lack of hardware vendor cooperation get improved by moving the problem into userspace?

You still need/want the hardware vendors to create drivers and update them, which they frequently don't.

I guess it's better because you're just going to be content with binary blobs?



Yes, that's exactly the point: unlike Linux, and like Windows, Fuchsia defines binary interface for drivers. As long as new releases of Fuchsia keep supporting the old interface, old driver blobs will keep working.


It's common to conflate the idea of source availability with problems encountered by lack of binary stable interfaces. One of the problems with the status quo on Linux isn't that drivers aren't released as source, but that they aren't upstreamed. This causes the drivers to no longer be valid very quickly. If you solve the validity problem, folks can continue to release drivers, alongside their source and they will continue to be valid even as the rest of the operating system evolves. Just because Windows drivers tend to not have source available doesn't mean that it's a given the same will be true for fuchsia drivers. It is ultimately product makers who use fuchsia as a platform who drive the incentives for what driver authors do with their drivers.




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