> I might be naive here but I think they have technical reasons to switch to Fuchsia which is an RTOS...
Nowadays, Linux's realtime is pretty good. Steven Rostedt has extensive documentations on how to "debug" realtime on Linux. You know what's the number one source of non-realtime-ness in Linux? It's parts of hardware that Linux simply can't control. He found that on many PCs, the BIOS triggers SMI (to refresh the RAM IIRC), and said SMI blocks the CPU.
In case you're thinking "Surely this is an x86-only mess", well, sorry, but that's wrong. It's even worse for embedded systems with shared memory bus, where modem has higher priority over the bus, and can decides to stall any memory access made by the CPU.
Switching to Fuchsia won't change much wrt real-time. (Possibly with Fuchsia, it is harder for OEMs to footgun their drivers, which would still be an improvement)
I think the reason Android would switch to Fuchsia is simply that Google is too big to rely on the community, and most engineers there don't have an opensource mind, so overall it makes it more convenient for Google to get rid of 3rd parties. Yes, it is a technical reason.
I agree that extinguishing is not Google's goal (which is why I didn't add embrace/extend). It is just a side-effect.
Nowadays, Linux's realtime is pretty good. Steven Rostedt has extensive documentations on how to "debug" realtime on Linux. You know what's the number one source of non-realtime-ness in Linux? It's parts of hardware that Linux simply can't control. He found that on many PCs, the BIOS triggers SMI (to refresh the RAM IIRC), and said SMI blocks the CPU.
In case you're thinking "Surely this is an x86-only mess", well, sorry, but that's wrong. It's even worse for embedded systems with shared memory bus, where modem has higher priority over the bus, and can decides to stall any memory access made by the CPU.
Switching to Fuchsia won't change much wrt real-time. (Possibly with Fuchsia, it is harder for OEMs to footgun their drivers, which would still be an improvement)
I think the reason Android would switch to Fuchsia is simply that Google is too big to rely on the community, and most engineers there don't have an opensource mind, so overall it makes it more convenient for Google to get rid of 3rd parties. Yes, it is a technical reason.
I agree that extinguishing is not Google's goal (which is why I didn't add embrace/extend). It is just a side-effect.