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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: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Thursday February 16 2017, @08:05PM

    by Foobar Bazbot (37) on Thursday February 16 2017, @08:05PM (#467931) Journal

    Well, yes. I use a chromebook -- Asus Chromebook Flip; the best ARM netbook I know of. I was thinking of blowing away ChromeOS completely, but initially set up Crouton (a chroot-based heap of scripts and what-not to run Debian, Ubuntu, etc. alongside ChromeOS) and was won over by the convenience of that combination; I have ChromeOS on one hand for the 2/3 (or more) of time I'm in a web browser or ssh terminal, and an X server on the second virtual console for everything else.

    I'm not real concerned with Google spying on me, because even if I had nuked ChromeOS, I would still be running Chrome or Chromium, still using GMail, etc.; this computer was always going to be pre-compromised in the name of convenience. (I have other computers that I'm less tolerant of spyware on, but this one's not meant for serious business.)

    FWIW, I don't think I'll be interested in this successor OS; ChromeOS iis only handy because of the ease of running normal Linux distros alongside, and I don't expect that will be a priority for Andromeda.

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