We haven’t been hearing much out of the Fuchsia team anymore after said team was hit hard by the Google layoffs, but we’ve got some news so my fancy Fuchsia database category doesn’t go entirely to waste. As Phoronix highlights, Fuchsia support is being upstreamed to Mesa 3D, indicating that no, Fuchsia is not entirely dead.
This adds fairly standard support for Fuchsia in
↫ Gurchetan Singhsrc/util. It’s being used in downstream forks of Lavapipe and it’s useful for gfxstream-vk. The idea is to incrementally merge these obvious changes to help reduce the patch load until someone has time to upstream the full driver.
As you can tell from the language here, we’re dealing with the first experimental steps, and a lot more work is required before full Fuchsia support can be added to Mesa 3D, as further evidenced by the various friendly conversations attached to the merge request. After some small changes to the code here and there, the code was merged a few days later, so it seems the process can continue.
It used to be quite easy to predict where Fuchsia was going, since pretty much every indication was that Google had grand ideas for the project, and consequently, the Fuchsia team was large, staffed with well-known names, and the kind of progress we saw all pointed towards a role for Fuchsia on smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and perhaps even beyond. There was a real sense that Google intended to almost silently replace the Linux base with Fuchsia in Android, and all the technologies to do so were either in place or actively being worked on.
Then came Google’s massive layoffs, though, and the Fuchsia team was hit proportionally harder than other teams, and now, it’s not so clear anymore what the future has in store for this custom operating system. Several Fuchsia-related efforts were wound down, from no longer porting Chrome to Fuchsia to killing Fuchsia smart speaker efforts. This was one of the few truly interesting projects inside Google, and it presented a real chance that we might see a new major operating system enter the market, for the first time in decades.
Alas, Google gonna Google.
> There was a real sense that Google intended to almost silently replace the Linux base with Fuchsia in Android, and all the technologies to do so were either in place or actively being worked on.
Silicon Valley is the last place where you would search to find real, technical progress. Or indeed the US as a whole. Your workhorse passenger jet, the 737, dates from the early 1960s.
Where are the operating systems for today’s generation. Everything we use – Unix family like GNU and Mac, or Windows – are boomer generation OS.
I don’t find it weird that we don’t see a lot of new operating systems. The world consolidated and capitalism has seen benefit in common bases. A new OS costs millions if not billons to develop and support. Whipping up a small, niche thing is not a problem. Getting past the hobby/curiosity stage is.
At the end of the day people and companies use their machines to get things done. Whether it is business or entertainment. A new OS either needs to have cheap, but performant dedicated hardware or it needs to run on the most common equipment. Drivers and supported hardware is a big hurdle. No one benefits from an OS that can’t run normally on bare metal. Anything that is perpetually stuck in virtual machines doesn’t cut it.
Then there is the sticky issue of applications. You can have a kick ass OS. Runs on any bare metal or VM you throw at it. Is performant and lean. Has amazing features. If it can’t run the most common applications people expect, you are dead in the water. Which incidentally is also the problem with the current crop of alternative OSes that do run more or less succesfully on bare metal. They port over applications from Linux/BSD and in doing so lose their own distinct identity and kill their chances for native development. At which point the question arises why you should run the OS in the first place as the applications are native to Linux/BSD.
So it is incremental change. Building on what was there yesterday.
r_a_trip,
I agree. Most of your points, spot on. However I’d put that “benefit” in quotes since for many such consolidation is detrimental and not a benefit. Many including myself could benefit from more competition & choice if only it were more viable. Nevertheless, given all the incompatibilities that alternatives are forced to deal with, they become impractical less commercial viable for all the reasons you speak up.
I would say google, thanks to their unique access to a duopoly market, has a very advantageous position to place Fuchsia in the hands of billions. They would have been able to overcome all of your impediments, but it died for another reason you haven’t yet mentioned: bureaucracy. Different leadership really would have produced a different outcome but corporate restructuring can also be a project killer.
FuchsiaOS requires to be available on desktop computers. It should be easily installed in VMs, or Intel/AMD hardware fast so more developer/technical people (but not kernel developers) can start using it and test it potential. I’m still waiting for some alpha release that is already built instead of following the “compile it yourself every time” instructions that is on their website.
So, again open source drivers, to be remotely useful, hopefully Google learns from it. Although i doubt it.