Fuchsia: What is it and what's new in its latest F14 version?

Since there are not many mobile operating systems, and many of them They are usually based on the Linux Kernel, and especially on Android, we regularly take a look at what's new in this area. Being the last time, when the version of Postmarket OS 23.06.

And since the 31th October 2023 was released new version F14 of Google's experimental mobile operating system called «Fuchsia », today we will take advantage of making a first small article about it, and the news of said launch.

PostmarketOS 23.06: A new version of the mobile OS available

But, before starting this post about the news of this new version called «Fuchsia F14», we recommend you explore the previous content related to other mobile OS, at the end of reading it:

PostmarketOS 23.06: A new version of the mobile OS available

Fuchsia: Google's experimental mobile operating system

What is Fuchsia?

Firstly, and if we go directly to your Official website, we can see that the project Fuchsia It is briefly described as follows:

Fuchsia is a modern open source operating system that is simple, secure, upgradable and powerful. As a general-purpose operating system, Fuchsia is designed to power a diverse ecosystem of hardware and software. Fuchsia is an inclusive, open source effort that accepts high-quality, well-tested contributions from everyone.

However, later they add that Fuchsia is currently capable of pprovide basic operating system functions, such as system resource management, a driver framework, and software abstractions. And that, as Google open source project in active development, many can today work with it, creating products and software for it using the SDK respective, or contributing to the source tree to create the Fuchsia platform.

News in Fuchsia F14

reading the official release notes of this new release, and extracting some of the new features included, we will mention the following:

At the level of application runtimes

starnix

Added support for mounting remote filesystems and for xattrs over symbolic links in fxfs. And also updated the behavior to start the synthetic UTC clock if a real clock is not started and the ext4 filesystem to use the filesystem cache.

At the Framework level

Released a component controller API that gives users direct access to lifecycle states.

At the connectivity level (Bluetooth, IOT, WLAN, Netstack)

Connectivity drivers

Added the ability to recover the FW subsystem on SDIO timeouts.
Added minor fixes and improvements.
Added stability fixes for firmware recovery.

Bluetooth

Fixed inaccuracy of media playback time in some situations.
Added initial in-band audio support for HFP.
Improved latency when streaming A2DP to a speaker.

Matter

Added transition time handling for color-related commands.
Added support for subject update group.
Updated subscription to all device structures.

Netstack

FastUDP was enabled on all platforms.

Thread

Added support for mDNS subtypes to the advertising proxy.
Added an update to stop responding to all subtypes.
Adjusted the auto restart mechanism.

Other known free or open mobile operating systems

And to finish this news, if you are one of those passionate mobile users who like to know and try other mobile operating systems, we leave you the following list with some of the most famous and used today:

Mobian, the mobile version of Debian that we can use almost like a mini PC

Summary

In summary, «Fuchsia » is a open source project revealed in 2017, which still seeks to be a promising development. In addition, it is still highly anticipated by many Android users, as it is Google's next operating system, which stands out for being based on the Zircon microkernel and not on Linux. But, it is expected to support Android applications for a necessary period of time, and to become a modern alternative to others like HarmonyOS and HyperOS.

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