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The HiSilicon Kirin 970 SoC, owned by Huawei, is now officially the first mobile platform for Google's Fuchsia operating system, based on recent changes to Fuchsia Gerrit, first identified by 9to5Google. In summary, the code has been reworked at the kernel level to support this chipset. This has been tested with a kernel boot on a Honor Play smartphone based on Kirin 970. This test was ultimately successful, but does not include the full range of Fuchsia software or firmware.
Context: Fuchsia OS first appeared on GitHub in 2016 and moved away from the Linux Kernal on which Android and Chrome OS are developed, instead using a built-in "Zircon" kernel. The overriding goal of Zircon is to enable an operating system to accomplish any task that others can accomplish while significantly reducing the resources required. The majority of product developments have remained well-kept secrets but at least some representations of the progress made to date have been made public. These showed a user interface heavily influenced by the "card-like" design implemented on Google products in Android and Chrome operating systems. In one of the last leaks, the Fuchsia lock screen was almost a replica of the one found in Chrome OS. Conversely, the home screen featured applications and features on maps, such as the Google app, rather than icons. Pressing one or the other of them has caused them to go back and forth, much like the animations found in the latest versions of Android, but with a similar user interface based on on cards.
Until now, all tests have also been done in web containers or on similar hardware to a laptop. This is despite the fact that Chrome OS is supposed to replace Android at some point in the next 5 years. In July, the number of engineers working on the platform has increased to include 100 engineers, with the hope that this number will continue to increase. It was postulated that the Fuchsia operating system would bypass the division of device interactions currently observed across all connected devices. In short, it is designed to look and act the same way, regardless of the platform to which it is accessible: units, smartphones, wearable devices, traditional computers and IoT-compatible devices such as refrigerators , lamps, speakers and smart TVs. Instead of dividing the interactions between each format, voice commands and other universal methods of controlling these devices will occupy a prominent place with Fuchsia OS. This will allow Google to consolidate all of its products into an ecosystem with only minor deviations.
Impact: With the new test showing a successful implementation of support for the Kirin 970 chipset, these efforts seem to have taken a big step towards that goal. From now on, only devices manufactured by Huawei or its subsidiary will be able to use any HiSilicon SoC. The Kirin 970 is also expected to be replaced soon by the more powerful Kirin 980 announced at the IFA Berlin 2018. So it will probably not be the first chipset to offer an alternative operating system to consumers, even if Huawei could always be among the first. responsible for mobile devices operating under Fuchsia. The objective of this test is to give Google an introduction in smartphones by showing that an installation can be performed on the current mobile hardware. The search giant must only finish building the rest of the code for Fuchsia. Once this is done, the challenge of transferring to another smartphone hardware should not be much harder than doing the same thing with Android OS.
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