Category Archives: News

Article note: Hm. They had gathered a bunch of the people with interesting OS ideas from the last 30 years (Be influence via Travis Geiselbrecht and Brian Swetland, bunch of clear Plan9 and 90s research microkernel influences), but like many google projects it was in that weird "not pure research, not obviously leading to product" space.

Enlarge / Google's Fuchsia OS, circa 2018, running on a Pixelbook. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google is still reeling from the biggest layoff in company history last Friday. Earlier cost cuts over the past six months have resulted in several projects being shut down or deprioritized at Google, and it's hard to fire 12,000 people without some additional projects taking a hit. The New York Times has a report about which divisions are being hit the hardest, and a big one is Google's future OS development group, Fuchsia.

While the overall company cut 6 percent of its employees, the Times pointed out that Fuchsia saw an outsize 16 percent of the 400-person staff take a hit. While it's not clear what that means for the future of the division, the future of Fuchsia's division has never really been clear.

Fuchsia has been a continuous mystery inside Google since it first saw widespread press coverage in 2017. Google rarely officially talks about it, leaving mostly rumors and Github documentation for figuring out what's going on. The OS isn't a small project, though—it's not even based on Linux, opting instead to use a custom, in-house kernel, so Google really is building an entire OS from scratch. Google actually ships the OS today to consumers in its Nest smart displays, where it replaced the older Cast OS. The in-place operating system swap was completely invisible to consumers compared to the old OS, came with zero benefits, and was never officially announced or promoted. There's not much you can do with it on a locked-down smart display, so even after shipping, Fuchsia is still a mystery.

Article note: Heh. Pre-VM UNIX ported to microcontrollers that dramatically out-muscle the machines it was developed on. That's fun. I don't see exactly how they're handling the 16/32b matter (the parent was PDP-11 16 bit UNIX, these are 32bit micros). I don't think I have any suitable F4 boards lying around or I'd be wasting the rest of the morning fiddling with it.

Article note: Speaking of Pascal. That's pretty neat. I'd be more hyped about a good bare-metal Pascal of that style targeting something a little smaller (stm32? esp32? riscv?), but it's still neat. Looks like it requires a hacked-up FreePascal/Lazarus system, and isn't self-hosting (like that little crosstalk Smalltalk-80 environment).

Article note: Neat. Mostly pretty literate "Clascal" pre-standard Object Pascal, some 68k assembler. I'm a little peeved that the archive has clearly been re-encoded and has DSStore and MACOSX hidden files all over the place.

Article note: That's unfortunate. Smile was a clever little nudge to to help get around the "Shopping at Amazon is obviously unethical, but it's real convenient" problem.

Article note: This is the most on-brand thing imaginable.

Article note: Cars, much like TVs, are better when they _interface_ to gadgets but do not _contain_ gadgets. The incentives and competence for [auto|tv] makers mean they're going to be clunky crap abandoned as quickly as possible, and stuffed full of spyware. That said the "I read the symmetric encryption keys out of the updater package and used them to update it" part is hilarious.

Article note: Done. The update behavior is interesting. The tool is picky (in that "Flashback to ActiveX bullshit" kind of way) about the platform that does the update. Has to be a real computer (won't work from Android). Has to be running Chrome 108+ (My out-of-support Chromebook with 106 or whatever wouldn't work). Can't be a Linux box with Chromium or Chrome (always fails with "Close other tabs using the controller Couldn’t connect to your controller because it’s currently being used by another tab or program."). I eventually passed it through to a Windows 10 VM with google-brand Chrome and got it to work, and that exposed some extra details. Instructions and responses: Hold "..." during plug in press "..." + that other button with three dots right below it + A + Y all at once Re-enumerates as "NXP Semiconductors SP Blank RT family" [Server does something] Re-enumerates as "Freescale Semiconductor USB Composite Device" [Server does something] Re-enumerates as "Google LLC Stadia Controller rev. A" ... it looks like it's temporarily nudging the NXP (formerly Freescale) MIMXRT1061 processor into some kind of DFU-like firmware update mode via the button combos, loading a different bitstream so it can act as a USB composite device to expose the update mechanism of the BCM43458 (radio), flashing that, then rebooting the main CPU back into the USB HID controller mode. You do lose the headphone jack, which is a bit of a shame because having it work as a Bluetooth audio device would make it even more useful - but at least it's a Bluetooth controller.

Article note: The exotic of the exotic. DoD special-order portable PA-RISC workstations with "known example" counts in the single digits.

Article note: Wow. That's decent behavior, and the controller is actually pretty nice. ...I half wonder if they're just keeping the RE nerds away from their tech.