Slashdot Mirror
Google's Mysterious Fuchsia OS Can Now Run On the Pixelbook (theverge.com)
Google's mysterious operating system, dubbed Fuchsia, has been in the works for more than a year now with very few details about the OS made public. According to a new report from Chrome Unboxed, we have learned that Google has released documentation to allow developers to load Fuchsia onto the company's Pixelbook. The Verge reports: This isn't your typical developer operating system, and you'll need two machines to host and target a Pixelbook to load the OS. It's very much a work in progress, with early hints at a user interface and functions. It's still interesting that Google has chosen its own Pixelbook to experiment with, though. Fuchsia has mostly been linked to embedded systems like wearables and Internet of Things devices in the past, but testing was expanded to Intel's NUC and Acer's Switch Alpha 12 Chromebooks. Fuchsia has been created from the Google-built Zircon microkernel, and not the typical Linux kernels that hold Android and Chrome OS together. It's not immediately clear exactly why Google is building a new operating system, nor what devices it will run on. As testing spreads to more Chromebooks, some are now speculating this could be a successor to the "Andromeda" project that never materialized.
It's not immediately clear exactly why Google is building a new operating system...
Possibly to un-encumber themselves from the GPL? I note that Fuchsia's licenses are a mix of MIT, BSD, and Apache. This would potentially allow them to adapt the OS to just about any environment without having to release the source code.
Finding God in a Dog
Google has always suffered from NIH syndrome. They will develop and abandon their own kernel rather than use the Linux kernel with billions of development hours because Google engineers didn't write linux.
It really is that simple.
What? They have been using a modified Linux kernel in Android and ChromeOS for nearly a decade now. They use a modified version of the kernel in their server farms. Clearly they are using Linux. Or is that not enough? They have to use it forevermore - Linux is the be-all-and-end-all of kernels, and can never be improved upon.
I thought this was a tech site?
That's a fair statement. Strictly speaking code-wise, there's no mystery. However, I'm pretty sure that a very limited number of folks have commit access to the code on the main branch, so if those individuals are being awfully quiet about what goals they're trying to reach with their code, it can be "mysterious" as to the purpose of the code (like what problem is it trying to solve or is this just some kind of wack-a-hack project, etc...). Not knowing what the point of the code is, makes it a bit difficult to know what the next move is. Maybe they want to add POSIX compatibility, maybe not, no one knows if POSIX compatibility missing is a bug or on purpose (and yes, I'm just pulling an example out of thin air, it really could be anything). However, not knowing the point makes it hard for a new coder to jump in with the main branch. Now if they wanted to start their own derived project, totes cool there. However, imagine if their some issue with libc compatibility that someone spots, they develop a patch for it and the devs with commit access are like, "nope we did that on purpose because the goal isn't to be compat with libc" or something like that (again, just random example pulling out of thin air here). The best we can do is guess at what the devs are ultimately trying to get at here or even if there is a point to all of this or if this is just some academic dumping ground project for them.
That's a critical thing with projects. You might have amazingly well written code, but if the communication between the programmers is crap, you're going to end up with crap. A project is more than just the codebase. A project is a multitude of things, of which, the codebase, the communication, and the leadership, among others, are major players in.