Fuchsia: a new operating system

Posted Apr 1, 2017 3:04 UTC (Sat) by michaelgugino (guest, #113545)
Parent article: Fuchsia: a new operating system

Downloaded the build tools and compiled it. My first impression was not great compiling on an AMD system. Was able to get the OS to boot after hacking apart some of their bash scripts and changing a couple of the qemu options. Pulled up the terminal, I was unable to get much of anything to work following the instructions for some of bits that are already included. Launching an application seemed to immediately crash the system.

Ships with a slightly modified musl libc implementation, IIRC. That part is interesting.

I'm not a kernel or embedded C developer, but this looks like the work of a couple interns or students during summer of code. This might be a v1/POC of something that they are building behind the scenes, but it doesn't look like a serious effort from Google at this point.

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Fuchsia: a new operating system

Posted Apr 3, 2017 0:16 UTC (Mon) by aryonoco (guest, #55563) [Link] (2 responses)

Let's look at some of the people we know are working on Fuchsia:

Travis Geiselbrecht, one of the main developers of BeOS and NewOS. An original member of the the iPhone team and the OS for the Danger Hiptop/T-Mobile Sidekick.

Brian Swetland: Core developer of BeOS and Danger Hiptop One of the original developers of Android.

Chris McKillop, a member of the original iPhone team and the original WebOS team who also worked on the QNX. He also worked on the Danger Hiptop.

Adam Barth, a longtime member of Google's Chrome and Flutter teams. He also built an operating system for Raspberry Pi called Tau.

And probably many more that we don't yet know about.

These are not a bunch of interns; Google has hired/poached some of the OS developers in the world and put them to create Fuchsia. These are early days, but I expect to see a lot more from these guys in the next couple of years.

Fuchsia: a new operating system

Posted Apr 3, 2017 3:21 UTC (Mon) by kingdon (guest, #4526) [Link] (1 responses)

If I had to guess, it would think it is more 20% project than anything else at this point. But that's just speculation (and "Google doesn't know yet" is a perfectly valid answer).

Fuchsia: a new operating system

Posted Apr 3, 2017 21:41 UTC (Mon) by aryonoco (guest, #55563) [Link]

The information available points to a group of few dozen rockstar OS developers that Google has poached from Apple, Blackberry, Android and Chrome specifically to work on Fuchsia.

This is no one's hobby project. This is a long term bet by Google, but a very serious one, similar to RISC-V.