7 ms·
Total speculation: but I seriously doubt that Fuchsia is specifically for chromeOS. The whole point of decent, efficient, simple, non-bug-prone APIs is that yo
by emn13 9y ago
Total speculation: but I seriously doubt that Fuchsia is specifically for chromeOS. The whole point of decent, efficient, simple, non-bug-prone APIs is that you probably want to implement pretty much everything on it. Simplicity and low-overhead allow for generality and flexibility.
If all you wanted to do was support chromeOS - well, typically you can add hacks even to a messy codebase to support specific usecases. And there are a bunch of linux and ?BSD distros that demonstrate that you can adapt such a system to even very small devices; small enough that there's not much niche left below. Moore's Law/Denard scaling may be comatose on the high-end; but lot's of long-tail stuff is generations behind; which implies that even really low-power IoT stuff that linux is currently ill-suited for will likely be able to run linux without too many tradeoffs. I mean; the original raspberry pi was a 65nm chip@700MHz - that's clearly overkill; and even if chip development never has a breakthrough again, there's clearly a lot of room for those kind of devices to catch up, and a lot of "spare silicon" even in really tiny stuff once you get to small process nodes.
But "being able to run linux" doesn't mean it'll be ideal or easy. And efficiency may not be the only issue; security; cost; reliable low latency... there are a whole bunch of things where improvements may be possible.
I'm guessing Fuchsia is going to be worse than linux for ChromeOS - in the sense that if ChromeOS really was what google wants it for, they could have gotten better results with linux than they'll be able to get with Fuchsia in the next few years and at a fraction of the cost. Linux just isn't that bad; and a whole new OS including all the interop and user-space and re-education pain is a huge price to pay. But the thing is: if they take that route they may end up with a well tuned linux, but that's it.
So my bet is that you'd only ever invest in something like Fuchsia if you're in it for the long run. They're not doing this "for" ChromeOS, even if that may be the first high-profile usage. They're doing this to be enable future savings and quality increases for use cases they probably don't even know they have, yet. In essence: it's a gamble that might pay off in the long run, with some applicability in the medium term - but the medium term alone just doesn't warrant the investment (and risk).
- __s 9y agoTake for example their "replace Intel ME with Linux" project
- jacksmith21006 9y agoAgree 100%. I very much doubt it is to replace ChromeOS.
- bitmapbrother 9y agoThey may not replace ChromeOS, but I'm going to guess they'll replace the Linux kernel with Zircon.
- derefr 9y agoI guess I left a bit too much implicit about my prediction on what Google's going to do: I have a strong suspicion that Google sees the Linux/POSIX basis of Android as an albatross around its neck. And ChromeOS—with its near-perfect app isolation from the underlying OS—seems to be a way of getting free of that. ChromeOS has already gained the ability to run containerized Android apps; and is expecting to begin allowing developers to publish such containerized Android apps to the Chrome Web Store as ChromeOS apps. This means that Android apps will continue to run on ChromeOS, without depending on any of the architectural details of ChromeOS. Android-apps-on-Android prevent Android from getting away from legacy decisions (like being Linux-based); Android-apps-on-ChromeOS have no such effect. I suspect that in the near term, you'll see Google introducing a Chrome Web Store for Android, allowing these containerized, CWS-packaged Android apps to be run on Android itself; and then, soon after that, deprecating the Play Store altogether in favor of the Chrome Web Store. At that point, all Android apps will actually "be" ChromeOS apps. Just, ones that contain Android object files. At that point, Google can take a Fuchsia-based ChromeOS and put it on the more powerful mobile devices as "the new Android", where the Android apps will run through Linux ABI translation. But in this new Android (i.e. rebranded ChromeOS), you'll now also have the rest of the Chrome Web Store of apps available. Google will, along with the "new Android", introduce a new "Android Native SDK" that uses the semantics of Fuchsia. Google will also build a Fuchsia ABI layer for Linux—to serve as a simulator for development, yes, but more importantly to allow people to install these new Fuchsia-SDK-based apps to run on their older Android devices. They'll run... if slowly. Then, Google will wait a phone generation or two. Let the old Android devices rot away. Let people get mad as the apps written for the new SDK make their phones seem slow. And then, after people are fed up, they'll just deprecate the old Android ABI on the Chrome Web Store, and require that all new (native) apps published to the CWS have to use the Fuchsia-based SDK. And, two years after that, it'll begin to make sense again to run "the new Android" on low-end mobile devices, since now all the native apps in the CWS will be optimized for Fuchsia, which will—presumably—have better performance than native Android apps had on Android.
- notriddle 9y agoFrom a branding perspective, that would be terrible. They've already invested a bunch in Google Play brand that isn't Android Apps (Play Music, Play Books, etc). Seems more likely they'll allow HTML apps into the Play Store, eventually getting rid of the Web Store entirely. They've already done the WebAPK stuff to glue HTML apps into Android.
- jacksmith21006 9y agoCompletely agree. I very much doubt Fuchsia is to replace ChromeOS.