On Fri, 26 Mar 2010, [email protected] wrote:
Robert Watson <[email protected]> wrote:
... web browsers [are] basically operating systems at this point ...
Isn't this a bit of an exaggeration? Not too many browsers have to deal
with process/thread scheduling, or device drivers, or booting, or file
system issues -- they rely on the OS for that (as does any other
application).
I think it's more of an anaology than an exageration. The FreeBSD kernel,
including device drivers and architectures, is around 3.9 million lines of
code. Google's Chromium, including WebKit, is around 4.1 million lines of
code. Both provide an extensive runtime environment for applications that run
on top of them, security domains, storage services, and management models.
I'm not arguing that web browsers are a substitute for our current operating
system layer: they clearly build on it. However, in terms of their goals in
providing an execution environment, user interface, etc, they fill a very
similar niche by being a general-purpose platform for many specific things.
And, to get back to the point I was making: if you toast your Chromium update
or get configuration management wrong, then your applications (Google Docs,
GMail, ...) on ChromeOS won't work any more than if you toasted your /lib or
/etc in FreeBSD. For example, if the Chromium configuration files change and
it forgets about web proxies, Chromium won't be able to call home to pick up a
fix any more than if etcmerge toasts resolv.conf.
Making updates easy is, to a large extent, about avoiding the creation of
foot-shooting opportunities. Some of it is about tools (binary updates,
mergers, rollbac, etc), but most of it is about avoiding scenarios in which a
previously valid configuration becomes invalid. And if we look at problems
FreeBSD has had with updates in a past, a lot come down to precisely that: for
example, renaming serial port device names (several times in as many years).
Robert
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