We haven’t been hearing much out of the Fuchsia team anymore after said team was hit hard by the Google layoffs, but we’ve got some news so my fancy Fuchsia database category doesn’t go entirely to waste. As Phoronix highlights, Fuchsia support is being upstreamed to Mesa 3D, indicating that no, Fuchsia is not entirely dead.
This adds fairly standard support for Fuchsia in
↫ Gurchetan Singhsrc/util. It’s being used in downstream forks of Lavapipe and it’s useful for gfxstream-vk. The idea is to incrementally merge these obvious changes to help reduce the patch load until someone has time to upstream the full driver.
As you can tell from the language here, we’re dealing with the first experimental steps, and a lot more work is required before full Fuchsia support can be added to Mesa 3D, as further evidenced by the various friendly conversations attached to the merge request. After some small changes to the code here and there, the code was merged a few days later, so it seems the process can continue.
It used to be quite easy to predict where Fuchsia was going, since pretty much every indication was that Google had grand ideas for the project, and consequently, the Fuchsia team was large, staffed with well-known names, and the kind of progress we saw all pointed towards a role for Fuchsia on smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and perhaps even beyond. There was a real sense that Google intended to almost silently replace the Linux base with Fuchsia in Android, and all the technologies to do so were either in place or actively being worked on.
Then came Google’s massive layoffs, though, and the Fuchsia team was hit proportionally harder than other teams, and now, it’s not so clear anymore what the future has in store for this custom operating system. Several Fuchsia-related efforts were wound down, from no longer porting Chrome to Fuchsia to killing Fuchsia smart speaker efforts. This was one of the few truly interesting projects inside Google, and it presented a real chance that we might see a new major operating system enter the market, for the first time in decades.
Alas, Google gonna Google.