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> At that time, Fuchsia was never originally about building a new kernel. It was actually about an observation I made: that the Android team had their own Linux

> At that time, Fuchsia was never originally about building a new kernel. It was actually about an observation I made: that the Android team had their own Linux kernel team, and the Chrome OS team had their own Linux kernel team, and there was a desktop version of Linux at Google [Goobuntu and later gLinux], and there was a Linux kernel team in the data centers. They were all separate, and that seems crazy and inefficient. I have to disagree with Chris on this, it allows these teams to tune their products exactly to their needs. If they wanted to streamline this process then the most logical step would be to upstream their patches (which the Android team has been doing [1]). Seems like the XKCD "Standards" meme stikes again [2] [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/android-to-take-an-upstream-first-development-model-for-the-linux-kernel/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/android-to-take-an-u... [2] https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
From my own experience working there... On the embedded side the problem was that the various consumer device Linux distributions really reflected org-chart boundaries, not really technical/engineering requirements. And this impacted velocity and quality. And yes, Fuchsia was not the answer here. Rewriting a bunch of stuff in Fuchsia just meant that the existing Chromecast distrib got neglected, bitrotted, and mistreated and failed to improve. But AFAIK it still hasn't gone away -- and likely won't -- so was that smart? Multiple distributions for specific needs are fine. Multiple distributions for political reasons is something else.