Google’s Fuchsia OS on the Pixelbook: It works! It actually works!

'Google currently has two OSes on the market: Android and Chrome OS. The company is never one to leave a successful product alone in the marketplace, though, so it's also developing a third operating system called "Fuchsia." When we last checked in on the experimental OS in May 2017, calling it an "OS" was a bit of a stretch. We only got the system UI up and running on top of Android, where it then functioned like an app. The UI offered a neat multi-window system, but mostly it was just a bunch of placeholder graphics. Nothing worked. It has been hard to check in on Fuchsia since. The Fuchsia system UI, which was written with a cross-platform SDK called "Flutter," quickly shut down the Android (and iOS) compatible builds. Fuchsia has a Vulkan-based graphics stack, and no emulator supports the new-ish graphics API. The only way to get Fuchsia up and running again was with actual hardware, and the only supported devices were Intel NUC PCs from 2015 and the Acer Switch Alpha 12 laptop. So after the recent news that the Fuchsia team picked the Chrome OS-powered Google Pixelbook as a supported device, we jumped at the chance to get it up and running. And after a little elbow grease, it actually booted. Now, we're not just running the system UI on top of Android like last time, we're running Fuchsia directly on a piece of hardware! This means it's finally time for a deep dive on what Fuchsia looks like in early 2018. Our usual in-development OS testing caveats apply: Fuchsia only started development in 2016 and probably has several years of development time ahead of it. Everything can—and probably will—change between now and release (if a release ever even happens). Google won't even officially acknowledge the OS exists—Fuchsia is a bunch of code sitting on fuchsia.googlesource.com.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/googles-fuchsia-os-on-the-pixelbook-... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

On Fri, 19 Jan 2018 16:04:29 +1300, Peter Reutemann wrote:
'Fuchsia is a bunch of code sitting on fuchsia.googlesource.com.'
-- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/googles-fuchsia-os-on-the-pixelbook-...
Based on a microkernel, apparently <https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/zircon>. I thought that battle had already been fought and lost over about the last 30 years or so. MINIX and Hurd remain niche products, and the BSDs only gained what popularity they have by compromising on the purity of the microkernel concept. Linux has very clearly demonstrated the superiority, even the sheer versatility and flexibility, of the modular kernel architecture. Nothing else seems likely to ever come close.
participants (2)
-
Lawrence D'Oliveiro
-
Peter Reutemann