# Magenta
-Magenta is a new kernel that powers the Fuchsia OS.
+Magenta is the core platform that powers the Fuchsia OS. Magenta is
+composed of a microkernel as well as a small set of userspace services,
+drivers, and libraries necessary for the system to boot, talk to hardware,
+load userspace processes and run them, etc. Fuchsia builds a much larger
+OS on top of this foundation.
+
+The Magenta Kernel is a medium-sized microkernel. It provides services
+(via syscalls) to manage processes, threads, virtual memory, inter-process
+communication, waiting on object state changes, and locking (via futexes).
+
+Currently there are some temporary syscalls that have been used for early
+bringup work, which will be going away in the future as the long term
+syscall API/ABI surface is finalized. The expectation is that there will
+be 10s, not 100s of syscalls.
+
+Magenta syscalls are generally non-blocking. The wait (one, many, set)
+family of syscalls, ioport reads, and thread sleep being the notable
+exceptions.
This page is a non-comprehensive index of the magenta documentation.
Source: GitHub
