Google is working on transferring Nest Audio smart speakers to a new firmware based on the Fuchsia OS. Fuchsia-based firmware is also planned to be used in new models of Nest smart speakers, which are expected to go on sale in 2023. Nest Audio will be the third device to ship with Fuchsia, after the Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max photo frames have already been transferred to this platform. The transition to the new system will be invisible to users, as the methods of interaction with the device and functionality will not change.
Fuchsia OS has been developed by Google since 2016, taking into account the scaling and security weaknesses of the Android platform. The system is based on the Zircon microkernel, based on the developments of the LK project, extended for use on various classes of devices, including smartphones and personal computers. Zircon extends LK with support for processes and shared libraries, a user level, an object handling system, and a capability-based security model. Drivers are implemented as user-space dynamic libraries loaded by the devhost process and managed by the device manager (devmg, Device Manager).
Fuchsia has its own graphical interface written in Dart using the Flutter framework. The project also develops the Peridot user interface framework, the Fargo package manager, the libc standard library, the Escher rendering system, the Magma Vulkan driver, the Scenic composite manager, the MinFS, MemFS, ThinFS (FAT in Go language) and Blobfs file systems, as well as the FVM partitions. For application development, support for C / C ++, Dart is provided, Rust is also allowed in system components, in the Go network stack, and in the Python language build system.
The boot process uses the system manager, which includes appmgr to create the initial software environment, sysmgr to build the boot environment, and basemgr to set up the user environment and organize login. To ensure security, an advanced sandbox isolation system is proposed, in which new processes do not have access to kernel objects, cannot allocate memory and cannot run code, and a namespace system is used to access resources, which determines the available permissions. The platform provides a framework for creating components, which are programs that run in their sandbox that can interact with other components via IPC.
Source: opennet.ru