Google’s upcoming operating system Fuchsia goes into the officially known fifth year and despite open development, the question arises more and more, in which areas it should be used. In fact, a long time ago Google had made quite extensive statements on the official website of the operating system about what Fuchsia is – and what it is not. The very slow rollout of smart displays also raises new questions.
We have often dealt with the fuchsia release here in the blog, which feels like it is getting closer and closer and yet seems a long way off. Last year, a developer preview seemed within reach and in fact, there was even a stable rollout to the first-generation Nest Hub Smart Displays. At the same time, important test steps have been skipped and yet Fuchsia is not tangible on the smart displays despite its usability. It is a matter of opinion at which stage you see fuchsia.
First of all, it must be clarified in which direction fuchsia should be developed at all. In fact, Google’s developers have explained quite extensively what Fuchsia is and at the same time made it clear what it is NOT. And although both are explained with several points and a few details, very specific questions remain unanswered. But there are also answers to some questions and indeed an official denial of earlier statements.
Small spoiler: The statement made by the Android boss almost two years ago about Fuchsia is officially refuted at this point! I will spare myself a full translation of the individual points at this point. Here are the most important points including some comments from me. The complete list with all points can be found on the Fuchsia website.
This is Fuchsia
Fuchsia stands for security and privacy
Security and privacy are woven deeply into the architecture of Fuchsia. The basic building blocks of Fuchsia, the kernel primitives, are exposed to applications as object-capabilities, which means that applications running on Fuchsia have no ambient authority. Software is delivered in hermetic packages and everything is sandboxed, which means all software that runs on the system, including applications and system components, receives the least privilege it needs to perform its job and gains access only to the information it needs to know.
Many modern operating systems have their roots in the last millennium, in which global networking did not yet play such a major role. Many security features have only been retrofitted, with Fuchsia this is the basic approach. Absolute safety is never guaranteed, but with Fuchsia, you should scratch it a lot.
Fuchsia is easy to update
Fuchsia packages are designed to be updated independently or even delivered ephemerally, which means packages are designed to come and go from the device as needed and the software is always up-to-date, as a Web page.
Fuchsia aims to provide drivers with a binary-stable interface. In the future, drivers compiled for one version of Fuchsia will continue to work in future versions of Fuchsia without needing to be modified or even recompiled. This approach means that Fuchsia devices will be able to update to newer versions of Fuchsia seamlessly while keeping their existing drivers.
Fuchsia has a modular structure and does not even allow the problems with which Android has been struggling for years. In addition to security, one of the most important approaches of the new operating system.
Fuchsia focuses on performance
Fuchsia makes heavy use of asynchronous communication, which reduces latency by letting the sender proceed without waiting for the receiver. Fuchsia optimizes memory use by avoiding garbage collection in the core operating system, which helps to minimize memory requirements to achieve equivalent performance.
Security, update capability and performance are huge points that do not have to be mutually exclusive. Fuchsia relies fully on asynchronous processes and communication so that the system always offers the highest performance and cannot be held up by other processes. At the same time, this ensures minimal requirements.
Fuchsia is open source
Fuchsia is built in the open using BSD/MIT-style open-source licenses. Fuchsia has an inclusive community that welcomes high-quality, well-tested contributions from everyone. Fuchsia is open source, as is much of the other Google operating systems. They will rely on the tried and tested concept of offering everything free of charge and freely accessible, but knitting their own services around them in such a way that nobody wants to do without them.
This is NOT Fuchsia
Fuchsia is not Linux
Fuchsia does not use the Linux kernel. Instead, Fuchsia has its own kernel, Zircon, which evolved from LittleKernel. Fuchsia implements some, but not all, of the POSIX specification as a library on top of the underlying kernel primitives, which focus on secure message passing and memory management. Many core system services, such as file systems and networking, run outside the kernel in least-privilege, need-to-know sandboxes.
With the exception of Windows, practically all modern operating systems are based on Linux or Unix. With Fuchsia, Google started from scratch and developed the Zircon kernel. Nevertheless, many POSIX specifications are adhered to, thus creating compatibility with the hardware and infrastructure of all major manufacturers. A completely new beginning without closing down too much.
Fuchsia is not a microkernel
Although Fuchsia applies many of the concepts popularized by microkernels, Fuchsia does not strive for minimality. For example, Fuchsia has over 170 syscalls, which is vastly more than a typical microkernel. Instead of minimality, the system architecture is guided by practical concerns about security, privacy, and performance. As a result, Fuchsia has a pragmatic, message-passing kernel.
Although Fuchsia outsources many areas, it is not a microkernel. Fuchsia or zircon will be a very powerful kernel that has not focused on minimalism on bending and breaking, but rather on practical applicability.
Fuchsia has no user interface
Fuchsia is not tied to a specific end-user experience. Instead, Fuchsia is general purpose and contains the building blocks necessary for creating a wide variety of high-quality user experiences.
A very important point: Fuchsia is a huge system, but the user interface is just an interface or a collection of components in the top layer. With this approach, you keep it open to give Fuchsia numerous surfaces, just as you need them. In principle, fuchsia could be used anywhere with it.
Fuchsia is not a playground
Fuchsia’s goal is to power production devices and products used for business-critical applications. As such, Fuchsia is not a playground for experimental operating system concepts. Instead, the platform roadmap is driven by practical use cases arising from partner and product needs.
The bang has been saved until the end: Fuchsia is not a playground for developers and not an experimental operating system. Interestingly, these are exactly the two bullet points with which Android boss Hiroshi Lockheimer described Fuchsia in spring 2019 when he was asked whether Fuchsia will one day replace Android.
But you also have to know that on Google the left hand often doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. In the case of internally competing products, in particular, there can even be complete isolation.
Even if we still don’t know exactly where Fuchsia should actually be used (apart from a single Smart Display model), these individual statements give a lot of interesting clues that we have almost all suspected for a long time: Google is daring with Fuchsia great new beginning and for the first time developed an operating system completely from scratch instead of relying on existing projects or kernels. This means that all modern requirements can be met without having to make compromises.
In addition, Google is reducing the dependency on external projects or even large waves of lawsuits such as the long and now completed Oracle proceedings against Android. At the same time, you open up to the already existing platforms through numerous interfaces and thus, and of course the cloud services, avoid the chicken and egg problem. Because you don’t just want to get such a restart on track and endanger the existing successful products, you have chosen the well-known route.
In principle, Fuchsia can be used on any hardware and in any environment. From smartphones to tablets to computers, smart TVs, smartwatches, smart displays, or as an embedded system. The fact that this will compete with other Google products in the long term does not matter and is also known to be ignored in many other projects. The little swipe at the Android boss shows that Fuchsia is a serious product, the time of which has not yet come. But that can change very quickly. The only question is, in what decade