Everything We Knew About Fuchsia's UI, Armadillo, Is Gone (9to5google.com)

Over the last two years, we have heard numerous reports about Fuchsia, a new operating system for phones, computers, and just about everything else by Google. We've seen it in a variety of demos, all of which featured a UI, codenamed "Armadillo." Now it seems that Armadillo, and thus everything about Fuchsia we've "seen," has been removed. Reader Suren Enfiajyan shares a report: Everything we've known Fuchsia to look like falls under Armadillo. Last May, when we got our first look at Fuchsia UI, it was possible because Armadillo was simply a Flutter app that could be built to run on Android. After some months, we were also able to show off the first five minutes of Fuchsia UI on the Pixelbook using Fuchsia's screenshot tool, and we saw improvements to Armadillo, like Google Sign-In support. All in all, it was clear Fuchsia was shaping up to become a clean operating system that implements and extends Material Design. Unfortunately, none of the demos and examples are accurate anymore. With a recent code change, humorously titled "Armadillo fainted!", spotted by Redditor alawami, we've reached the end of an era. Every single piece of Armadillo code has now been permanently removed from Fuchsia's Topaz repo.

Comments

Re:If now one has it...

[phantomfive]

If you want to look at the Fuschia source code, it's available here. To me, it looks more like a college-level project, rather than a kernel that has come into contact with the messy realities of the real world.

Their goal is to make things secure, and they want to do things 'right' by making it a micro-kernel.

Again, to me it looks like the authors have good knowledge on the theory side of things, but lack understanding of a lot of real-world use cases. For example, they removed a lot of the syscalls that the Linux kernel has, it's not Posix compliant, and you really should think long and hard before removing things in a decades-old, well-tested standard.

But who knows, maybe they'll get lucky and hit all the use cases Android needs. Maybe someone with experience will help them make the kernel solid. But most likely, the code will get uglier and uglier as it needs to accomodate more use cases, until it's so ugly that someone at Google starts a side project to replace it.