Google Working On New "Fuchsia" Operating System, Powered By Magenta / LK Kernel

[bregma]

Ah, Google is writing a couple of new kernels, one for IoT (LK) and one for phones and desktops (Magenta) that extends the IoT one, both with Apache licenses just like Android. That will let them get rid of the last bit of GPL software in their stack (which will make OEMs happy) and give them much more control over the entire software stack on every device in your life.

Imagine it: a US corporation subject to US law enforcement agencies and that earns its revenue from watching everything you do, controlling every aspect of pretty much every device around you. It's enhanced by a license that lets anyone, including non-US corporations, governments, agencies, or organizations, substitute their own code and still claim it's original. Makes you feel warm and cozy, yeah?

Also, the common kernel base and the broad applicability, together with the blurring between ChromeOS and Android, is clearly convergence in action. It's clearly the way of the future. You have the choice now on the convergence front: semi-open-source full-stack corporate lock-in with Google, messy closed-source cathedral-style corporate lock-in with Microsoft, or GPL-licensed Free software with Ubuntu.

[duby229]

That makes no sense at all. Honestly I never really understood why in the fuck google chose to use java. So stupid.

Anyway, LK seems like it would absolutely need hardware manufacturers to supply proprietary drivers for hardware enablement. I doubt many will backport existing drivers so this is unlikely to be a threat to linux for another 7-8 years at minimum. Who knows what will happen between now and then.

[Hi-Angel]

Well, if anybody curious: I joined #fuchsia channel on Freenode, shared the article 3 hours ago (and comments link, because the "Add comment" link was broken). Nobody of them commented, neither here, nor there; link was at the visibility all the time. ≈½ hour ago I asked a few questions, and got a couple of very tight answers, which is that unlikely the system is going to use Wayland, quoting "I would assume, given the code written so far, it will be specific to fuchsia"; and, judging from later comments, (which, though, doesn't seem were from devs), it looks like devs are tied by NDA.

[Hi-Angel]

Quote from the link, gotten on IRC:

Some useful bits from IRC:
[16:21] <ocdtrekkie_web> Why's it public (mirrored to GitHub even) but not announced or even documented what it's for?
[16:22] <@swetland> ocdtrekkie_web: the decision was made to build it open source, so might as well start there from the beginning
[16:22] <lanechr> ocdtrekkie_web: things will eventually be public, documented and announced, just not yet
[16:23] <@swetland> currently booting reasonably well on broadwell and skylake NUCs and the Acer Switch Alpha 12, though driver support is still a work in progress
[16:24] <@travisg> yeah and soon we'll have raspberry pi 3 support which should be interesting to some folk

[Hi-Angel]

Another bit of info: Magenta have no compatibility with Linux modules.

[c117152]

From what I can tell, it's a microkernel with object abstractions that's compiled against musl and uses the ChromeOS userland.
It was probably approved when Google saw how trivially Microsoft implemented the linux syscalls and managed to run so much of ubuntu in such a short amount of time.

[droidhacker]

Just a little bit of information that most people here would probably benefit from knowing about.... your Android phones most likely *already run* littlekernel.
aboot (multi-boot loader), and fastboot are applications that run on littlekernel.
https://source.codeaurora.org/quic/l...tree/app/aboot -- note that "lk" == "littlekernel".

[Hi-Angel]

Just a little bit of information that most people here would probably benefit from knowing about.... your Android phones most likely *already run* littlekernel.
aboot (multi-boot loader), and fastboot are applications that run on littlekernel.
https://source.codeaurora.org/quic/l...tree/app/aboot -- note that "lk" == "littlekernel".

Mhm, mine have version 3.4, and I doubt that 15M lines is little enough :Ь

More over, LK modules are incompatible with Linux ones. And, given there's a bunch of peoples hacking around to have Cyanogen Mode up and running on new phones, plus manufacturer's programmers, who needs to know what API they programming for, the world would have know about the new kernel quickly.

[mmstick]

Rust has been found in the source code.

[funtastic]

Most interesting thing I found out from this: it uses Flutter, a framework to develop Android/iOS apps from Google (using Dart). This project has been flying under everyone's radar, but it looks like finally we are seeing Google reacting and making something better than the current tools to develop for Android (Java, Android SDK).

https://flutter.io/