What is Google building its new OS, Fuchsia, for?

Google has acknowledged that a new OS is being built. We try to find out why.

Google has started work on building a new operating system, called Fuchsia. It has been noted in Google’s code depository on GitHub, and the pile of codes have revealed that it is not based on the Linux kernel, hence differentiating it from Google’s existing operating systems -- Chrome OS and Android. While the signs of a new operating system is indeed matter of excitement, what remains shrouded in mysteries is what the OS will be used for. The only thing that is mentioned by Google above the pile of code is, “Pink + Purple == Fuchsia (a new Operating System)”.

What could Fuchsia be meant for, then? The core code of the operating system appears to focus on keeping in light on resources, and as The Verge notes, could be the operating system that fuses Google’s Chrome OS and Android into one. Reports about this had surfaced late last year, but Google had subsequently quashed such rumours, and Chrome OS lived on as an individual entity. The possibility, though, has been rekindled with Fuchsia’s advent, along with other sources claiming that Fuchsia may be used for peripherals like Google’s OnHub router, or Google’s lineup of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. A part of Google’s Fuchsia code states that it is built on Magenta, not the Project Magenta, but a micro-kernel used in embedded computing devices like a car’s connected entertainment system or smartwatches. That may be a possible scope of usage for Fuchsia, and more relevance is added to this idea as the two developers listed on GitHub - Christopher Anderson and Brian Swetland - are senior software engineers, and have previously worked on projects like Android TV - an embedded computing hardware.

Many, though, are claiming that only this will be a very marginal case of use of Fuchsia. Google’s documentation of the Magenta micro-kernel states that it has “first class user-mode support”, and “targets modern phones and modern personal computers with fast processors, non-trivial amounts of ram with arbitrary peripherals doing open ended computation.” Fuchsia also includes support for graphics rendering, and these two evidences combined suggest that the OS may indeed be used for something greater than embedded systems. Google already has its own Android-based IoT platform Brillo, which can be used for the smaller systems.

As The Verge reports, Google is already testing Fuchsia, and it is working fairly well. Fuchsia has been running well on small-form Intel PCs and even an Acer Switch Alpha 12 laptop, and support will soon be added for Raspberry Pi 3. Google has reportedly decided to build it open source, so we can expect more details to be unveiled soon.

And, well, with the amount of mystery shrouding the project right now, we cannot help but hope Fuchsia will lead to much greater software innovation than what we’re guessing for now.

Source: DIGIT
Author: Souvik Das

YouTube: Google's Fuchsia OS | Source. Compile. Run.

Fuchsia – Google’s New Open Source Operating System

Project Fuchsia is Google’s attempt to expand its holdings with a new operating system for use with personal computers and phones. Google was very successful with its Android OS which has grabbed 65.5 percent of the U.S. market. Google now sets it sites on the PC world and similar success.

Google was very successful with its Android OS which has grabbed 65.5 percent of the U.S. market. Google now sets it sites on the PC world and similar success.

Fuchsia is in its infancy, but is currently up and running on an Acer Switch Alpha 12 hybrid tablet.

There are plans for running Google Fuchsia on a Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi 3 Model B will probably be the model that gets Fuchsia.

Fuchsia is an open-source project which allows view the code, learn from it, copy it, share it, edit it, and use it in their own projects. The open source community promotes collaboration and sharing of source code for millions of projects by millions of programmers.  As a result Google’s Fuchia could see improvements in reliability, security, and quality.

You can find the Fuchsia project on Google's website and on Github.

Source: Daily Tech
Author: Elroy Bethell

What the Fuchsia? Google's trying out a mysterious new operating system

The software is designed for "modern phones and modern personal computers," which suggests Google intends to compete against Microsoft's Windows and possibly its own Android.

First there was Windows vs. Mac. Then came iOS vs. Android. Now with a project called Fuchsia, Google could be starting a new software platform war -- but we don't yet know who's on the other side of the battle line.

Fuchsia, which emerged Friday, is an operating system designed for "modern phones and modern personal computers," Google says. For those devices, the tech titan already has Android and Chrome OS, raising the possibility that Fuchsia will compete with Google's own work.

It's hard to launch a new mainstream operating system. But with Android, Google became one of the few companies to successfully do so, and the Fuchsia team includes veterans of operating systems including the legendary BeOS. And as Apple showed with iOS on its iPhones, a new operating system can bring dramatic new benefits to consumers.

You may be happy with Windows, Android, MacOS or iOS. But there's still room for improvement. A fresh start in the world of operating systems could mean stronger security, more responsiveness, longer battery life, and an easier time for programmers writing sophisticated apps.

OS hurdles

Building an operating system is technically hard, especially one like Android or Windows that has to handle a wide variety of hardware. And when building a new OS, it's hard to get developers to write software tailored for it -- a key problem that doomed many operating systems, including Windows Phone, Mozilla's Firefox OS, Palm's WebOS and Ubuntu Touch. If people aren't using the software, there's no incentive for developers to support it.

And getting consumers excited about operating systems is tough. "Users really don't want to run operating systems -- they want to run apps," said Gartner analyst Michael Silver.

Google could help a fledgling operating system by making it compatible with Android. But that would also make it harder for Google to make a true fresh start.

Operating systems can also succeed in narrower domains -- anything from network equipment to microwave ovens, for example. And it's not yet clear what Google's Fuchsia ambitions are. The company declined to comment further on Fuchsia.

An operating system manages a device's most basic operations. It registers keyboard clicks, sends data over a network, juggles the tasks running on a processor, stores files on a drive, displays graphics on a screen and controls a phone camera. At the center of the OS is software called a kernel, which in Fuchsia's case is called Magenta.

Android is based on the open-source Linux kernel that has been around since 1991.

Fuchsia is still in its early stages. Google has it up and running on an Acer Switch Alpha 12, a laptop-tablet hybrid, but apparently also wants to get it running on a Raspberry Pi, a much less powerful machine. It also runs on devices powered by ARM chips, the type that powers almost all phones and tablets.

Fuchsia team

Some notable developers are contributing to the project. Among them:

• Travis Geiselbrecht, who worked on a failed but influential operating system from the 1990s called BeOS, the iPhone and the OS for the Danger Hiptop operating system, which T-Mobile sold as the original Sidekick.
• Brian Swetland, who worked on BeOS, the Hiptop OS and who spent many years toiling on the core parts of Android.
• Chris McKillop, a member of the original iPhone team and the original WebOS team who also worked on the QNX operating system used in cars and some BlackBerry devices. He also worked on the Danger Hiptop.
• Adam Barth, a longtime member of Google's Chrome team who more recently has been working on a Google tool designed called Flutter to make it easier for programmers to write software that runs on Android and iOS. He also built an operating system of his own called Tau.

Fuchsia is an open-source project, meaning anyone can see the underlying programming instructions, modify them and use them for their own purposes. It's hard to sell open-source software the way Microsoft sells Windows or Adobe Systems sells Photoshop, but it's easier to attract outside programmers to contribute an open-source project, and it's more likely the software will be used and improved as a result.

The Fuchsia project is hosted both on Google's own site and on the publicly available Github.

Source: C|NET
Author: Stephen Shankland

What we learned from running Fuchsia, the mysterious new OS from Google

Computers are like cars, we are used to just starting them up and using them. We often forget the complexities and intricacies of what is happening under the hood. Android, Windows, OS X, and Linux are all complex operating systems, but what we use today is the mature product that has been in development for years. Fuchsia isn’t like that. It is new, it is in its infancy, it is a work in progress, it is incomplete and it is a mystery.

When I wrote about Fuchsia a few days ago, I included a link to the build instructions, how to take the source code and build it to make a bootable version of the OS. Having written about it, the next logical step was to follow the instructions and see what pops out the other end.

Compiling Fuchsia OS

The easiest way to build Fuchsia is to use a 64-bit Intel Ubuntu Linux machine. Apparently it will also build on OS X and it might work on other Linux flavors like Debian etc. If you aren’t familiar with Linux or you don’t have command-line ninja skills then this isn’t a task for you, but don’t worry I have done all the hard work for you!

At the moment Fuchsia is made up of two big parts. Magenta, which is the kernel, and the various tools, libraries and programs which take the raw Magenta kernel make it Fuchsia. At the heart of Magenta is the Little Kernel (LK), a small OS suited to small embedded devices and bootloaders. LK is tiny and has limited functionality beyond those needed for embedded systems. Magenta builds on top of LK to make an OS that is designed for systems which have more memory and which have peripherals (meaning it understands device drivers). For example, Magenta has the concept of a process whereas LK does not, Magenta has a user mode (where user programs run) whereas LK does not, and so on.

So to build Fuchsia you need to do two things. First is to build the tools and libraries which will run in user space, including a simple shell program called “mxsh”. The second is to build LK/Magenta. Once that is all done you can boot Magenta using a filesystem that has the Fuchsia user space executables.

Running Fuchsia OS

The simplest way to run Fuchsia is using qemu, the popular open source machine emulator. In fact, the Fuchsia source tree contains its own copy of qemu which is compiled as part of the overall build process.

When you boot Fuchsia you get lots of kernel level debug messages telling you about the system as it boots. The initial message says “welcome to lk/MP” and then the kernel goes on to initialise various subsystems like threads and  timers. After that comes the CPU detection, the scheduler, the device manager and networking. Once booted you get access to a simple shell called mxsh.

mxsh has a few built in commands including cd, cp, echo, ls, and rm. If you type in a word that isn’t a built-in command then the shell will try to run a program of that name found in /boot/bin/. The /boot/bin directory has lots of different executables, most of which are to do with the testing and further development of Fuchsia. For example one program is called “thread-depth-test” which tests the thread creation abilities of Fuchsia. There are also some simple executables like fortune and cowsay.

Most importantly is the support for Dart, Google’s scripting language which was originally earmarked as a replacement for Javascript. However Dart has grown since then and is now a fully fledged interpreted language which Google uses for its own in-house systems including AdWords. In general Dart can be run in one of two ways, by compiling it to Javascript (and then running it through a Javascript interpreter) or by interpreting it directly via the stand-alone Dart VM. The latter approach is used by Fuchsia.

To test Dart on Fuchsia there is a simple Dart script in /boot/apps called hello_fuchsia.dart which just prints “Hello, Fuchsia!” to the console. To run it type: dart /boot/apps/hello_fuchsia.dart

Seeing “Hello, Fuchsia!” on the console might not seem much, but actually that is quite impressive. It means that Fuchsia is advanced enough to run a complex interpreter environment, and run the script. This implies process management, thread management, memory management, file I/O and much more. It reminds me of Linux when it was first released, pre v1.0.

What does it all mean?

The first thing we can glean about Fuchsia OS is that Dart will play an important role. The current distribution doesn’t include and C compilers or other high level languages like Java, however Dart is there and working. Since Google has invested heavily in Dart this could mean that Google is working on a device that runs Fuchsia and will be programmed via Dart. A VR device maybe?  A home automation product? An intelligent device for accessing Google’s huge AI infrastructure? We also know that the Flutter project now works on Fuchsia. Flutter is a way to build high-performance, cross-platform mobile apps using Dart.

We also know that Fuchsia isn’t aimed at embedded systems (with just a few K of memory), it is for larger devices, from smartphone sized upwards. The idea that Fuchsia is some kind of desktop OS to compete with Windows or OS X, is in my opinion absurd. As are the notions that it is a replacement for Android or Chrome OS. For any OS to succeed commercially it needs to have a thriving and dynamic developer community. Google has invested millions in building up a developer community around Android and it isn’t about to jeopardize that.

Lastly it is worth repeating that Fuchsia is in its infancy. There is currently no graphical user interface (and it isn’t guaranteed that there will be one in the end). There is no consumer level distribution or installer, everything needs to be built from source. The number of commands and libraries is limited and so on. Having said that for those who understand the complexities of OS design, Fuchsia is progressing nicely.

The purposes and goals of Fuchsia are still a mystery, however it is a serious undertaking. Dart is certainly key, as is Flutter. It will be interesting to see where this goes. Any thoughts? Please let me know in the comments below.

Source: Android Authority
Author: Gary Sims

Fuchsia, Pink + Purple == Fuchsia (a new Operating System)

GITHUB

Fuchsia
Pink + Purple == Fuchsia (a new Operating System)














#fuchsia on freenode.org
Google Git
Github

Why is Google working on the new Fuchsia operating system?

Could this be the first step in the unification of all of Google’s operating systems?

Google, it seems, is working on a new operating system (OS). The project’s current name is Fuchsia, and it is currently just another piece of potential software in the massive pile of software code. (See more ) But what this software is designed for is currently a mystery.

Google makes the world’s most popular smartphone operating system, called Android. It also has an OS for computers called the Chrome OS as well as a software called Android Wear for wearable devices, such as smartwatches, apart from Android TV, CarPlay and OnHub. But the answer to unlocking this mystery could actually be hidden in these three operating systems—they are basically built on the open-source operating system called Linux. Fuchsia, on the other hand, is not.

One of the reasons why Google is shifting from Linux could be the fact that Magenta will also offer better security features, something that they have struggled with, particularly on Android, over the past few years. Photo: Bloomberg

Fuchsia opts for a different kernel to create a lightweight OS. It is believed that Google is using Magenta, a “medium-sized microkernel” that itself is based on a project called LittleKernel. The idea is to build a leaner and equally capable OS compared to the current ones. Magenta is designed for scale, and can work on a variety of devices such as smartphones and PCs.

Also Read: What we learned from running Fuchsia, the mysterious new OS from Google

The question is could this be a software for the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem? Google currently has the Android-based IoT platform called Brillo. Or is Google looking to unify Android, Chrome and others into a single operating system? One of the reasons why Google is shifting from Linux could be the fact that Magenta will also offer better security features, something that they have struggled with, particularly on Android, over the past few years.

At present, based on the little proof there is of Fuschia’s existence, it is difficult to say what Google plans to do ultimately with this software code. Software companies often publicly test new pieces of software to get help from more and more developers to spot and iron out issues and improve the performance. However, these pieces of software are also often ditched and not heard of again. No one can say right now whether Fuchsia will meet a similar fate, but it would not be surprising if it does. Google tends to work on a large number of open-source projects at any given point of time, across different stages of development, and many do fade away.

Source: livemint
Author: Vishal Mathur