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by mdhb 613 days ago
Also this mysterious new Fuchsia OS from Google is also shooting for full Linux compatibility and is about to show up in Android, I think this is a much more realistic path of the next generation of operating systems that have a real chance to replace Linux but who knows what their actual plans are here at the moment but I don’t believe for a moment that that project is dead in any way.
2 comments
vbezhenar 612 days ago
I wonder if decision for stable syscalls was genius? Like imagine that Linux syscalls will become what C ABI is now. And there will be multiple compatible kernels, so you can choose any and run the same userspace.
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surajrmal 612 days ago
Why would you want to support multiple? New versions should always be backwards compatible with older ones, so you'll always have the largest amount of compatibility by targeting the latest upstream. The real challenge comes with supporting applications that want features only available in forked kernels, which I guess could prompt wanting multiple kernels targeting the distinct ABIs.
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vbezhenar 612 days ago
You can ask the same question about libc, yet there are several competing implementations. Yes, compatibility is not perfect and there are applications which won't work on musl, but still plenty of applications do.
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lifty 612 days ago
Can you give more details about it being used in Android? I thought they started using it in some small devices like nest but haven’t heard anything about Android
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mdhb 612 days ago
It’s about to turn up inside Android running in a VM [1] but it was less clear exactly for what purpose.

My theory is that this is essentially a long term project to bring the core of Chrome OS and Android to rely on Fuschia for its core which gives them syscall level compatibility with what they both use at the moment and that they would both essentially sit as products on top of that.

This is essentially the exact strategy they used if I remember correctly with the Nest devices where they swapped out the core and left the product on top entirely unchanged. Beyond that in a longer term scenario we might also just see a Fuchsia OS as a combined mobile / desktop workstation setup and I think part of that is also why we are seeing ChromeOS starting to take a dependency on Android’s networking stack as well right now.

[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/microfuchsia-on-android-345...

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