I am really surprised Microsoft isn't doing something like this. They are losing the OS war.
They're taking a different approach. They're positioning .NET to be the Platform regardless of the underlying Hardware/OS.
Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android
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Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android
#22I've been wondering why so many Bloomberg articles have been on the front page recently, maybe in the last 3-6 months. This OP seems like a good example because there has been coverage of Fuchsia from more technical sources for awhile and I doubt the Bloomberg article adds much. Or is the change in frequency of Bloomberg posts just a misperception on my part? I don't have any data.
I also have the feeling that the amount of links to Bloomberg articles on HN significantly increased in the past months. I'm not a fan of that though, because Bloomberg articles seldomly cover really new topics or add in-depth information. Which is fine, as Bloomberg's audience is a different one than HN's, isn't it?
Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android
#23> "Switching away from Android could provide Google the opportunity to hit the reset button on any mistakes they believe they made a decade ago,". "They might be able to regain some power that they’ve ceded to device manufacturers and telecom carriers." How making a new OS achive this? What kind of problems Fuchsia could solve when Linux can’t solve? I personally hope Fuchsia would remain as an experimental project.…
One of Android's major headaches is that Linux does not have a stable driver interface. Interfaces within linux change regularly, but only drivers that are checked into the main tree are updated. If you maintain a driver outside of that tree, you will experience pain. That's how Android operated and why it's linux kernel rarely changed (and why doing OS updates for phones was so hard).
Android has been trying to fix this with treble[0], which will make many more phones get OS updates going forward. So Android has attempted to work around one of linux major problems.
Another large problem is that Linux was designed for desktop architectures. It's design and focus continues to go that way. This has impact across an entire range of functionality that an OS is supposed to bring.
Fuschia seems to be a research project with a focus on mobile/laptop type devices. It could care less about server type environments, which lets it make different tradeoffs in design.
Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android
#24I am really surprised Microsoft isn't doing something like this. They are losing the OS war.
They've already tried. There's no interest currently for a 3rd also-ran OS, especially from a vendor that would be changing up the toolkit yet again.
They're on like their fourth attempt, aren't they? They tried Pen Windows, then Windows CE and its derivatives, then there was the ARM version of Windows 8, and now they're hoping Intel tablets running Windows 10 can become a thing.
Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android
#25Apparently it uses a micro kernel, zircon.
I'm curious about this kernel, honestly making something new from the ground up doesn't seem like a good idea.
I wonder how much of an advantage it was for android to use linux as a kernel, but I guess it was a gigantic advantage, which let them focus on what mattered in the development of android.
Other question: any kernel/OS developer here to explain if a micro kernel makes his job easier or harder? Having the flexibility of a micro kernel seems good, but I'm not sure it's that much important.
Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android
#26This Bloomberg article has several shortcomings. 1. "Android and Chrome OS are built on Linux, a widely used open-source programming language." Here they mix up the Linux kernel with the Java programming language. 2. "Moving from Linux, though, could have upsides for Google. Android’s use of the technology, which is owned by Oracle Corp., is at the center of a lengthy, bitter lawsuit between the two companies. Shifti…
Imagine the horrors if Oracle "owned" Linux...
Well, they did their share of contributions
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/linux/techn...
As for Java, if Google actually cared to get away with their actions, they could have bought Sun.
Surely it would have been cheaper than what they already paied their lawyers.
Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android
#27Oh so that's what the rust crates fuchsia-zircon and fuchsia-zircon-sys are for. They are dependencies of the mio and rand crates.
Cargo.toml links to https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/garnet/
Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will need some form of compatibility to get a foothold in the market, though.
From what I can tell, the compatibility plan is to market flutter/dart as a cross-platform development toolkit for Android and iOS. Fuchsia won't run android apps, but fuchsia apps will run on Android and iOS.
There is some signal[1] that maybe Fuchsia as an OS will support Android apps out of the box. As I'm sure we both know though, ANYTHING can happen between now and the ship date.
[1] https://9to5google.com/2018/04/26/fuchsia-android-runtime-ap...
Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android
#29> "Switching away from Android could provide Google the opportunity to hit the reset button on any mistakes they believe they made a decade ago,". "They might be able to regain some power that they’ve ceded to device manufacturers and telecom carriers." How making a new OS achive this? What kind of problems Fuchsia could solve when Linux can’t solve? I personally hope Fuchsia would remain as an experimental project.…
One of Android's major headaches is that Linux does not have a stable driver interface. Interfaces within linux change regularly, but only drivers that are checked into the main tree are updated. If you maintain a driver outside of that tree, you will experience pain. That's how Android operated and why it's linux kernel rarely changed (and why doing OS updates for phones was so hard). Android has been trying to fix…
"That's how Android operated and why it's linux kernel rarely changed "
Android changed Linux kernels with every single release, from 2.6.27 to 4.10 by core release, and vendors often update kernels incrementally in between. Any driver issues are trivial to change presuming they didn't come in a binary blob and the source refused any further changes, which is supposedly the case with Qualcomm hardware in the Nexus 6, for instance.
"Android has been trying to fix this with treble[0]"
Treble is about the intra-Android interfaces, not Linux device interfaces. This is about Google doing large scale, breaking changes that made vendors just throw up their hands.
"Another large problem is that Linux was designed for desktop architectures"
Nope.
The reality is that everyone always thinks they can rebuild it better. Second (Third, Fourth, etc) system effect. It the very basis of NIH syndrome. So some small group at Google wants to research OS'. Whatever. The likelihood that this replaces Android, or that it is in anyone's imaginations that it actually will besides content writers outside of Google, seems very low.
Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android
#30This Bloomberg article has several shortcomings. 1. "Android and Chrome OS are built on Linux, a widely used open-source programming language." Here they mix up the Linux kernel with the Java programming language. 2. "Moving from Linux, though, could have upsides for Google. Android’s use of the technology, which is owned by Oracle Corp., is at the center of a lengthy, bitter lawsuit between the two companies. Shifti…
Imagine the horrors if Oracle "owned" Linux...
Well, SCO certainly tried to make that claim.