You can learn more about Fuchsia by diving deeper into the concepts driving its design. Fuchsia is still evolving rapidly, but the underlying principles and values of the system have remained relatively constant throughout the project.
Principles
The core principles guiding Fuchsia’s design and development are simple, secure, updatable, and performant.
Simple
Fuchsia makes it easy to create, maintain, and integrate software and hardware across a wide range of devices.
- Fuchsia prioritizes clarity and minimalism in its architecture and design.
- Fuchsia strives to be easy to understand and easy to maintain.
- Fuchsia provides the core foundations of an operating system—like hardware access, resource management, and software abstraction—in a coherent way, creating a robust, stable platform for products.
Secure
Fuchsia has a kernel and software model designed for modern computing.
- A capability-based system fully isolates processes by default, and limits program access to only the capabilities and resources that have been explicitly granted.
- Software components are distributed as hermetic packages that provide security boundaries and guarantees.
- Software isolation, or “sandboxing,” is enforced by the operating system, which lowers the resource costs for security.
Updatable
As a modular operating system, Fuchsia allows the kernel, drivers, and software components to be independently updatable.
- Stable ABIs make it possible for the operating system, device drivers, and product software to remain compatible over longer time horizons. This reduces the maintenance burden on product developers, and extends the lifespan of devices for consumers.
- Software is delivered in packages that can be updated independently and even delivered on demand, like the web.
- Google is committed to updating and maintaining Fuchsia over time.
Performant
Fuchsia is designed for real world product requirements and optimized for performance.
- Fuchsia is a general purpose operating system that enables high performance across a variety of platforms, architectures, and devices.
- Fuchsia efficiently manages system resources—processors, memory, storage, networking, and power— to optimize performance.
- Fuchsia meets performance goals in commercial devices currently in production.