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

[phoronix]

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

Google appears to be working on a new operating system that's written from scratch and appears to be target both phones and PCs, among other form factors...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Google-Fuchsia-OS

[macemoneta]

Um, why? Linux can be built very light weight. Even $5 tiny embedded devices run Linux / OpenWRT, and yet it offers huge functionality just by enabling needed options. Hardware manufacturers are building chips specifically to support embedded Linux. It's taken thousands of software developers and thousands more hardware developers a quarter century to reach this functional level and breadth. It seems to me that anything Google needs to do, they can simply integrate into Linux - to the benefit of the greater community.

[dh04000]

I have this weird feeling that this a convergent os based on a fusion of android and chrome.

[mike4]

to get rid of java probably

[Hi-Angel]

I'm not excited at all. GNU/Linux and/or BSD ecosystem isn't going to benefit from it; Android at least has Linux kernel, so manufacturers wrote drivers for it.

What's interesting, the project can actually succeed, simply because of marketing. If there was a GNU/Linux company who would've done as much marketing as Microsoft or Apple does, the «Year of GNU/Linux desktop» would have happened much earlier.

[Hi-Angel]

Michael "Add comment" link in the article is broken

[Hi-Angel]

I must say, the project is in its very early stage. But looking at the repository, I, probably, a bit mistaken that the ecosystem isn't going to benefit. They're not going to rewrite absolutely everything, I see there's ffmpeg, zlib, freetype, go, cmake, etc.; this also mean that this kernel has POSIX API. I'm curious what protocol windows system going to use (i.e. if its Wayland, or a custom one), but code of Compositor hasn't yet a single line of code.

That's all, not much to see yet, actually.

[NateHubbard]

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/magenta/+/5a5236c1b2a74c77ef196e7f083d0863dc89f667

Interesting. I wonder what exactly they are planning with this.

[UseLinuxNotWindows]

LK looks more like an alternative to FreeRTOS (and other embedded OS's) than a serious competitor for Linux. A huge amount of time and effort has gone into making the Linux kernel what it is today. That is why Apple did not write OS/X from scratch but took OpenSTEP (later released by Apple as "Darwin") and built on top of that. Even if you created a lightweight POSIX compatible OS just to run Java (which is in effect what Android is), Google would have a huge uphill struggle for it to gain traction. I suspect that the new OS is for IOT devices and other light weight devices rather than a replacement for Android's OS layer.

[rubdos]

A friend of mine said he thought the reason that Anroid was written in Java was to get rid of the Linux Kernel at some point.

I call EEE. It's BSD licensed, so it'll be a lot easier to make things proprietary for vendors.