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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

I think Fuchsia and KataOS server different purposes. If I read this announcement correctly, KataOS is aimed more at smart light bulbs and such whereas Fuchsia is aimed at relatively powerful devices with a UI (thermostats, smart clocks, etc.) or with significant processing capabilities (Google Home and other smart speakers).

The Github page for Sparrow is counting RAM usage in megabytes with decimals, I don think Fuchsia will even run with less than 30MB of RAM. Their example for OOM events shows a device with 8GB of RAM, though I find it doubtful that even Google's hardware is that wasteful with system resources.

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TL from the project here: you are absolutely correct. KataOS is for embedded systems research, whereas Fuchsia is more of a batteries included system designed for consumer devices.

Does it use or work with with Rust's embedded-hal in some way?

I'm not seeing mention of it on the initial website, so am guessing "no". :/

Ah, makes sense. I had seen the mention that the KataOS implementation is running on 64-bit ARM now in QEMU, which sounded more like Fuschia's space.

Though those small devices are getting pretty big hardware these days, since it's cheap now. Some of the Nest thermostats have 512MB of RAM, and 2GB in the higher end Home hubs.

It's kinda nutty to me that my thermostat has more RAM than my Windows XP laptop did 20 years ago.

Based on the function it serves I'm actually kind of appalled. It's a thermostat. You set the temperature and a schedule and it follows along. An ESP32 can do all the Wifi and Bluetooth connectivity you want with half a megabyte of RAM. Maybe you need a few megabytes for a framebuffer for the screen it has. But half a gigabyte?!

Well if your thermostat or meeting room door sign runs an instance of chromium in kiosk mode to use HTML/CSS/JS for its UI then you need 2 gigabytes of RAM.

Yeah a lot more goes into the Device than what you would expect. It's not some RTOS base hack-a-day kind of product.

>The Github page for Sparrow is counting RAM usage in megabytes with decimals,

I had to look it up [1] and fact check this statement. Turns out it really is "megabytes with decimals". Amazing!

[1] https://github.com/AmbiML/sparrow-manifest

So it’s more aimed to compete with Zephyr than with Linux

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