Fuchsia might replace both Android and Chrome OS

Apr 11, 2018 23:46 GMT  ·  By

Google has recently published documentation for its upcoming Fuchsia operating system that many believe it will someday replace both Android and Chrome OS.

Fuchsia OS has been in development for more than two years, and Google didn't actually say anything to the public about its secret project until now, when it published in-depth documentation about the upcoming operating system, called "The Book."

As both Android and Chrome OS are using the Linux kernel at their core, many believed that Fuchsia OS is also a Linux-based operating system, but Google makes it very clear that "Fuchsia is not Linux" in the newly published documentation.

Fuchsia is a modular, capability-based operating system

According to the documentation, Fuchsia aims to be a modular, capability-based operating system using a so-called Zircon kernel, which is a microkernel providing the core drivers and the C Library (libc) implementation for the Fuchsia OS.

While the documentation is far from complete, we can't help but notice that Google's Fuchsia OS is quite unique, innovative and promising, using own libraries and components built from scratch, though it's a UNIX-like operating system with POSIX backwards compatibility and using Vulkan-based drivers.

For example it uses a physically-based renderer called Escher, which provides volumetric soft shadows, lens effects, light diffusion, and color bleeding. Also, Fuchsia’s filesystems appear to live entirely within userspace and aren't linked to, nor loaded with the kernel.

"Fuchsia’s filesystems themselves can be changed with ease -- modifications don’t require recompiling the kernel. In fact, updating to a new Fuchsia filesystem can be done without rebooting," reads the documentation.

If you're curious to learn how Google is building its Fuchsia operating system, you can study the available documentation. We can't wait for the rest of Fuchsia’s parts to be documented, so we can figure out what Google plans to do with it.