Petr Hosek, head of Google's build systems, compilers, and developer tools team, unveiled the first device to ship with the Fuchsia operating system. Fuchsia-based firmware will begin shipping to Nest Hub smart photo frames as part of an experimental update for members of the Google Preview Program.
If there are no unforeseen problems during the trial implementation, the Fuchsia-based firmware will be applied to the devices of other Nest Hub users who will not notice the differences, since the interface built on the Flutter framework will remain the same, only the low-level components of the operating system will change. Previously, Google Nest Hub devices launched in 2018, combining the functions of a photo frame, multimedia system and smart home control interface, used firmware based on the Cast shell and the Linux kernel.
Recall that in the framework of the Fuchsia project, Google has been developing a universal operating system since 2016 that can run on any type of device, from workstations and smartphones to embedded and consumer equipment. The development is based on the experience of creating the Android platform and takes into account the shortcomings in the field of scaling and security.
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