Google Experiments Bring Fuchsia OS To Android Devices

Microfuchsia is designed to run on virtual machines, on Android devices. (photo: x @majedandroid)

JAKARTA - Google is developing a microfuchsia,' a lightweight version of Fuchsia operating system currently running on Google Nest Hub. Microfuchsia is designed to run on virtual machines, and Google appears to be experimenting with running them on Android devices.

Fuchsia OS is an open-source operating system like Android and Chrome OS. However, in contrast to the two operating systems, Fuchsia is not built on the Linux kernel. Fuchsia uses Zircon, which according to Google consists on kernels and a small set of user, driver, and bibliography services required for the core function of the system such as booting.

The milike microkernel' architecture of Zircon allows Fuchsia to reduce the number of trusted codes running in the system'' by only a few core functions, which can improve security and stability due to the reduction of the number of codes with high privileges compared to the usual monolithic' kernel.

Rumors from mid-2018 mentioned that Google has ambitious plans to send Fuchsia OS on smartphones, PCs, and smart home devices. While the goal still looks very far (if it's not canceled at all), Google has successfully launched this operating system on smart home devices, starting with the first generation Nest Hub in 2021.

Tim kemudian berhasil merekatkan Nest Hub Max yang lebih besar dan Nest Hub generasi kedua ke Fuchsia OS, menjadikannya perangkat kedua dan ketiga yang menjalankan sistem operasi ini.

To develop Fuchsia further than smart home devices, Google has been working on projects like Starnix to run unmodified Linux binaries on Fuchsia devices. In addition, since late April this year, Google has been working on a new project called microfuchsia which aims to allow Fuchsia to be boosted on existing devices via virtualization. Microfuchsia, according to Google, is a Fuchsia OS build that targets virtual machines and is designed to beboottable in virtualized solutions such as QEMU and pKVM.

pKVM is a hypervisor for Android Virtualization Framework (AVF), a feature Google introduces on Android 13 on specific devices. Google is developing AVF and pKVM to run certain types of jobs in a securely isolated environment. To execute this work, Google created a highly reduced Android OS version called microroid which only contains core Android services, tools, and minimum bibliography.

Although it has not been confirmed, it is possible that Google intends to use microfuchsia in the same way as microdroids. In other words, Google may intend to microfuchsia handle tasks that need to be executed safely by the host operating system, in this case Android. Microdroids are already functioning for this purpose, but maybe microfuchsia will do so sooner or safer (or both).

The patches were recently submitted to the Open Source Android Project (AOSP) setting up a basis for new APEX files that will contain microfuchsia. APEX is a file format used by Project Mainline to package system components, and APEX files are those that load all AVF-related binaries on supported Android devices. Although com.android files.microfuchsia APEX is not yet available, references to its presence in AOSP and codes found in Fuchsia Gerrit are of great interest.

Currently, it's still unclear what Google's plans are with microfuchsia, but these developments will continue to be monitored to see if this project is really going to be implemented.