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?

Re:If it gains popularity

[darkain]

And thus why I always love the constant bitching about the classic LAMP stack here on Slashdot. Yeeeup, this is what I work with in my day job. Yeeeup, this has been what I've worked with for a decade now. Yes, I'll continue to use it, too. Yes, it has its flaws, but it is extremely well supported, and has a very clear support and development structure moving forward for the next 10 years.

What is an OS?

[lucasnate1]

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

Re:What is an OS?

[squiggleslash]

We refer to them as part of an OS. An OS is kernel + userspace. The original author's comment can be explained by his disclaimer at the end that he's not a programmer and may have gotten much of the terminology wrong.

Re:What is an OS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because without userspace infrastructure, this would be called a kernel?

Re:What is an OS?

[YukariHirai]

While generally a valid complaint about the way people talk about operating systems, the article does mention that they're replacing the Linux kernel here.

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:to what end?

[slashdot_commentator]

If Google stops supporting them, the backlash will be pretty severe.

Ridiculous. Any chromebook that is updateable can have its OS replaced with Andromeda.

The NUC isn't humble

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because it's small doesn't mean that it's humble. With i7's and 32G ram they easily out perform the humble mac mini which used to be a new development, throw in a closet and let it run box.

I'm running ESXi with decent results as well as other home lab experiments. (NVR, etc)

I will name him George

[jfdavis668]

and I will hug him, and pet him, and squeeze him

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.

Re:"the kernel is called Magenta."

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure? It's right here: https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/magenta

MIT license. Are we talking about the same thing?

Work me, personal me, my kid

[raymorris]

If I could quickly and easily switch users on my phone, I'd immediately set up three profiles to keep things separate:

Ray@work
Ray@play
RaysKid

No more accidentally triggering auto-complete of a personal URL while at work. I can let the kid play a game on the phone while I'm driving, knowing the toddler won't be clicking on important work or personal stuff.

Re:Is Google slowly dropping Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since much of this already exists in Chromium, does that mean that Google is pushing for JavaScript / Progressive Web Apps? You could have lighter installs of application or just links to web apps run. It almost sounds like they're going the Firefox OS route.

Google has been threatened with serious problems by Oracle with Java. Google was effectively forced to build an alternative with zero Oracle input in it so that, if they had lost the suits, they had a place to go with their products. Now that it looks like Oracle is losing, there's a chance that Java based stuff will survive long term, however the groups that sprung up with alternatives will not be killed for a long time. They now have a chance to kill Java in Google or at least take its crown as the leader. Perfect example of the killing the goose that could be laying you golden eggs. Oracle could easily have sat there and profited from their ownership of java by merging the Android and JVM environments. Instead they will likely damage even their corporate ecosystem.

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.

Re:Google competence

[adam.voss]

... to produce a secure system that is closed source?

It may not make a difference in your argument, but it is worth noting that Fuchsia is currently open source: https://github.com/fuchsia-mir....

Re:"the kernel is called Magenta."

[RevDisk]

https://github.com/fuchsia-mir...

Unless I'm way off base, there's the kernel.