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.

Comments

Quidquid id est...

[demon driver]

..., timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. And no, I don't mean the Greek, and in case of Google or any such entity, it actually shouldn't be "even when they bear gifts", but "especially when they bear gifts".

Why develop your own OS?

[MAXOMENOS]

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.

Re:Why develop your own OS?

[Misagon]

There are technical reasons also. Android under the Linux kernel does sandboxing by giving each app its own user, which I find to be a bit of a kludge.

Fuchsia's microkernel Zircon (nee Magenta) instead uses capability-based security, in a model where Processes live in Jobs and Jobs can be nested, allowing the ones that are deeper nested having lesser privileges.
However, Zircon has a major flaw: capabilities can not be revoked, other than by killing the whole process, or jobs.
If I had been in charge, I would have instead chosen seL4, which has revocation, is stable on ARM and which has a formal proof of correctness (was it ten or twenty man-years of work just for the proof? I forget).
But, yeah... seL4 is licensed under GPL. ;-P