Google’s ChromeOS team has begun borrowing Android’s technology to innovate faster, reduce the burden of maintaining multiple operating systems and improve device interoperability in the face of vendor kernel variability, it says Company.
Prajakta Gudadhe, senior director of engineering, and Alexander Kuscher, senior director of product management for ChromeOS, announced the technical transition, which has been underway since at least February, in a blog post on Wednesday.
“By bringing Android-based technology to ChromeOS, we can accelerate the pace of AI innovation at the core of ChromeOS, simplify engineering efforts, and make various devices such as phones and accessories work better with Chromebooks,” said Gudadhe and Kuscher.
“At the same time, we will continue to deliver the unparalleled security, consistent look and feel and comprehensive management capabilities that ChromeOS users, businesses and schools love.”
The Google duo said those using ChromeOS devices won’t see the changes for a while and promised a seamless transition once Android technology takes over. The technical hassle happens at a level that end users are unlikely to notice, aside from the consequences such as faster device pairing, higher pairing success rate, and better reconnection success rate – all of which Google says it has seen in internal tests.
The first phase of the system pipe renovation began in 2021 and is called Project Floss. It involves applying Fluoride, Android’s Bluetooth stack, to ChromeOS as a replacement for BlueZ, the Linux Bluetooth stack.
Dental hygiene metaphors at Google don’t just apply to codenames for wireless networking projects; they also serve to explain the objectives of product management. People who have been following The Chocolate Factory for a while may remember that Google co-founder and former CEO Larry Page said that Google aimed to “create services that people in the world use twice a day, just like a toothbrush. “
As noted in a technical blog post from a quartet of ChromeOS people – product manager Russ Lindsay, software engineer Abhishek Pandit-Subedi, senior software engineer Alain Michaud and technical program manager Loic Wei Yu Neng – Project Floss aims to reduce technical overhead , to unify Google’s engineering efforts into a single stack, and reduce fragmentation in the ecosystem.
According to Lindsay and friends, the relative newness of ChromeOS means that peripheral manufacturers aren’t doing a great job testing and validating interoperability. And with the product kernel variations that occur, maintaining interoperability on the ChromeOS platform can be a challenge.
In addition to better compatibility, Project Floss is also expected to improve security, partly because it is written in Rust and because it touches less of the Linux kernel than BlueZ.
“The Bluetooth implementation is fully included in the Floss daemon,” Lindsay et al. explain. “The Floss daemon is sandboxed in user space using minijail to reduce permissions to the minimum required for Bluetooth operation, which significantly improves the security of the system.”
Google says the transition will help it deliver AI tools and features across desktop and mobile devices, as evidenced by its Chromebook announcement in May. However, the changes to the tech stack to make that possible are not specified.
This is what a Google spokesperson said The register It’s too early to say what other Android frameworks will be brought to ChromeOS, but cited the introduction of AI wallpapers in the Pixel 8 phone last fall as an example of what the company hopes to make easier in ChromeOS. We’re told that the ChromeOS team essentially created its own implementation of AI background in Chrome 125, and that some of the redundant engineering effort could have been avoided if there had been more overlap in the tech stack. ®