Google's Not-so-secret New OS (techspecs.blog)

According to reports late last year, Google is working on a new operating system called Andromeda. Much about it is still unknown, but according to the documentations Google has provided on its website, it's clear that the Fuchsia is the actual name of the operating system, and the kernel is called Magenta. A tech enthusiast dug around the documentations to share the followings: To my naive eyes, rather than saying Chrome OS is being merged into Android, it looks more like Android and Chrome OS are both being merged into Fuchsia. It's worth noting that these operating systems had previously already begun to merge together to an extent, such as when the Android team worked with the Chrome OS team in order to bring Update Engine to Nougat, which introduced A/B updates to the platform. Google is unsurprisingly bringing up Andromeda on a number of platforms, including the humble Intel NUC. ARM, x86, and MIPS bring-up is exactly what you would expect for an Android successor, and it also seems clear that this platform will run on Intel laptops. My best guess is that Android as an API and runtime will live on as a legacy environment within Andromeda. That's not to say that all development of Android would immediately stop, which seems extremely unlikely. But Google can't push two UI APIs as equal app frameworks over the long term: Mojo is clearly the future. Ah, but what is Mojo? Well it's the new API for writing Andromeda apps, and it comes from Chromium. Mojo was originally created to "extract a common platform out of Chrome's renderer and plugin processes that can support multiple types of sandboxed content."

Comments

If it gains popularity

[Big Hairy Ian]

If it gains popularity when will Google pull the plug on this one?

What is an OS?

[lucasnate1]

Why do we refer to a userspace infrastructure/UI API as an OS? Are KDE and GNOME OSes now?

to what end?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome OS and Android are both untrusted, and inherently untrustable OS's. I would never allow one of them to run on any hardware I owned due to Google being a marketing and data harvesting company above all else. That is in their DNA and pervasive in their software which exists to collect as much of your data as possible.

Merging them into one OS is not going to make that any better.

Re:"the kernel is called Magenta."

[geek]

Replacing Linux with a home-rolled kernel?

Yes and at present it is closed source.

I am NOT an open source ideologue, however, with Google closed source kernel could only mean that snooping is baked-in at the kernel level. They are not in business of selling OS, so I couldn't think of any other reason to close source it.

They should have named this kernel Tom, as in Peeping Tom.

Its entirely likely they will open it up eventually. Right now its early R&D phase. Time will tell I guess.

Google competence

[emil]

Despite a blinding array of talent that works for the organization, this is the architecture for multimedia that they produced:

Don't start me on Stagefright and Mediaserver, I could rant for 2 or 3 hours non-stop! Seriously, the code over there is crap, and has insane concepts, like aborting the whole mediaserver (and all related media decoding of all other applications running at the same time), when it parses a file with attributes it does not know, instead of skipping the file. We discovered some issues in Stagefright (busy loops, device reboots, mediaserver crashes) quite early, but we never thought about submitting them.

Google has in no way acknowledged the exceptionally poor design of Android, and there is no evidence that the organization has improved and learned from their management mistakes. How then can they be trusted to produce a new operating system? And why would anyone trust them to produce a secure system that is closed source?

I don't care if Verizon gives it away. Absolutely not.