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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: 1) by andersjm on Thursday February 16 2017, @05:14PM

    by andersjm (3931) on Thursday February 16 2017, @05:14PM (#467878)

    So what is the license? Presumably you found out, so why not tell the rest of us?

  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday February 16 2017, @07:37PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 16 2017, @07:37PM (#467922) Journal

    They do seem to be rather shy about specifying the license. You may need to download the source to find out what it is, as I didn't see anything while around the site. A short google search reports "License, Various, including Revised BSD, MIT and Apache 2. ", so perhaps there's no consistent license.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by andersjm on Thursday February 16 2017, @08:25PM

      by andersjm (3931) on Thursday February 16 2017, @08:25PM (#467943)

      That's a bit scary. If the "various licenses" are for libraries used by Andromeda and not Andromeda itself, it could be that there is no license at all. And that doesn't mean a free-for-all: If there's no license then they haven't granted the public license to do anything, and that means they could at any time sue anyone who's using their code for copyright violation.

      I'm not going near that code with a 1.5m pole.

      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday February 17 2017, @04:22PM

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 17 2017, @04:22PM (#468253) Journal

        Don't worry, you don't need a license if you just drive it on your own property. If you cross the highway, just get off and push.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Friday February 17 2017, @02:58AM

      by butthurt (6141) on Friday February 17 2017, @02:58AM (#468056) Journal

      The Magenta Kernel (kernel/...) is under the MIT License, a copy of which
      may be found in kernel/LICENSE

      The Magenta System (system/...) and Bootloader (bootloader/...) are under the
      BSD License, a copy of which may be found in system/LICENSE

      The Third Party Components (third_party/...) are under various licenses
      (of the BSD, MIT, or Zlib style), which may be found in the root directory
      of each component, respectively.

      -- https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/magenta/blob/4e0dd124b4e5f512b733bbbe517c028f1d3ecf05/LICENSE [github.com]