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posted by on Thursday February 16 2017, @01:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the more-data-to-not-be-evil-with dept.

TechSpecs Blog ponders:

I decided to dig through open source to examine the state of Google's upcoming Andromeda OS. For anyone unfamiliar, Andromeda seems to be the replacement for both Android and Chrome OS (cue endless debates over the semantics of that, and what it all entails). Fuchsia is the actual name of the operating system, while Magenta is the name of the kernel, or more correctly, the microkernel. Many of the architectural design decisions appear to have unsurprisingly been focused on creating a highly scalable platform.

It goes without saying that Google isn't trying to hide Fuchsia. People have clearly discovered that Google is replacing Android's Linux kernel. Still, I thought it would be interesting for people to get a better sense of what the OS actually is. This article is only intended to be an overview of the basics, as far as I can comment reasonably competently. (I certainly never took an operating systems class!)

To my naive eyes, rather than saying Chrome OS is being merged into Android, it looks more like Android and Chrome OS are both being merged into Fuchsia. It's worth noting that these operating systems had previously already begun to merge together to an extent, such as when the Android team worked with the Chrome OS team in order to bring Update Engine to Nougat, which introduced A/B updates to the platform.

Google is unsurprisingly bringing up Andromeda on a number of platforms, including the humble Intel NUC. ARM, x86, and MIPS bring-up is exactly what you would expect for an Android successor, and it also seems clear that this platform will run on Intel laptops.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16 2017, @02:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16 2017, @02:03PM (#467778)
    The end user owns the phone?! Don't make me laugh. Apple has always truly owned the phone, just as much if not more than any Android phone is owned by its manufacturer or telco.
  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday February 17 2017, @04:19PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 17 2017, @04:19PM (#468250) Journal

    I gave your post a little thought, off and on. Didn't Apple tell Big Brother to take a leap, because they couldn't break into a phone? At the least, Apple respects your ownership of a phone enough to refuse to be a party to spying on you. Apple's phone, or your phone? Whichever, it's a better deal than you're going to get on the average smart phone.