Google’s secretive Fuchsia OS is designed to work with a wide variety of devices, including IoT, phones and even more traditional computers like the Pixelbook.
As such, the Fuchsia development team is continuously testing on new devices, including some newly released Chromebooks with AMD processors. This includes the HP Chromebook 14 and Acer Chromebook 315.
9to5Google spotted a recent code change submitted to the Chromium Gerrit — an online tool for developers to collaborate on and review code before merging it — that would allow Fuchsia to work on these Chromebooks.
Essentially, the code change allows AMD-powered Chromebooks on the ‘Grunt’ board to boot Fuchsia’s Zircon kernel. That kernel serves as the foundation of the operating system. Typically, the ability to boot into other operating systems is blocked by default on Chromebooks. Some devices, like the Pixelbook and Pixel Slate, do allow multiple OS installations on a single device.
Interestingly, the developer behind the change wrote in a comment: “I don’t have a board to test this on and I don’t think the Zircon kernel works on AMD yet, but they need this enabled to develop for it…”
This suggests the Fuchsia team requested the change. 9to5Google says none of the developers attached to the code change have ties to the development of Fuchsia, so this revelation isn’t a big surprise.
The other thing that can we can glean from the comment is that this is likely part of the early stages of Fuchsia development on AMD boards. That means support for running the full Fuchsia OS on Grunt boards is a ways off.
Recently, some phones also got support for booting the Zircon kernel, like the Pixel 3 XL and on the Honor Play.
Source: Chromium Gerrit Via: 9to5Google
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