It would be neat if there was a standard interface for device drivers, similar to what POSIX does for user-space. That way, interesting kernels like this one can just comply with that and the enormous amounts of Linux modules can be ported to comply with that standard so that they can also be loaded by redox, blueos,etc..
But the complication I suppose is data-structures being accessed by drivers that reside in the core kernel and other assumptions that come with linking against a monolith program like the Linux kernel. It would be momentous to simply get Linux drivers to comply with a kernel-agnostic ABI.
IMO, the reason we have a sea of open source drivers available now is because of the lack of a standard driver interface.
If one existed, companies would not be compelled to release their drivers' source, and would just release closed source drivers. As it stands, kernel drivers must be open source because the kernel API/ABI changes, and drivers must be recompiled against new kernel releases. It's infeasible to release a compiled driver .ko and have it work with new kernel releases.
Similarly, companies will not be incentivized to mainline their drivers for hardware outside of hobbists' interests. We're blessed with a plethora of drivers for enterprise, cloud and industry hardware that would otherwise have never been released beyond vendors' customers' deployments.
What would happen to the Linux driver ecosystem is what happened with Nintendo, Sony, Apple and FreeBSD. You get closed source drivers siloed away in proprietary systems that will never be released. The deployed drivers will come with restrictions on use and distribution, as well, so it wouldn't be like you could pluck out compatible drivers to use elsewhere.
> It's infeasible to release a compiled driver .ko and have it work with new kernel releases.
It's not. At Ksplice we had a build farm and whenever a supported distro would release a new kernel, we would generate new .ko files for that kernel, usually within 24 hours. It was a lot of work, and very much specific to the Ksplice product. These days, between docker and DKMS, and limiting yourself to supporting a specific device, you'd have a much easier time of building a build farm to release a compiled .ko, if you were a hardware manufacturer that wanted to support that.
Vendors running build farms into perpetuity so that end users can use their hardware with new kernels does seem impractical from where I'm standing, yeah.
I don't see vendors supporting their hardware for more than a few years if new kernels need new module builds regularly.
Am I misunderstanding what you were talking about?
Yeah I guess we just don't agree on what's practical. For a million dollars over the course of, let's say, five years for support, you could get someone to do this job.
AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, Virtualbox, VMware, Dell, and Realtek using DKMS for their closed source drivers today, is also where I'm coming from.
I’m using the definition that something can’t be done. The comment you responded to was regarding releasing a compiled ko and having it supported by newer kernels. Your response was we solved this by recompiling it.
A specific .ko file can't work against arbitrary kernels, no. The customer problem of I have a kernel and this hardware and need a .ko file for it is solvable.
> It would be neat if there was a standard interface for device drivers, similar to what POSIX does for user-space.
Plan 9 does this but instead of a binary interface that exposes machine details it hides them behind 9P, a simple RPC file tree protocol. This same protocol is also served by user space programs so it's universal. The benefit of all this is the system is small and very light weight. Its an OS a single human can grok from kernel to user space.
Since 9p abstracts everything it's kernel and language agnostic. A Plan 9 kernel can be written in Rust and serve the same 9P tree to a Plan 9 written in C, Go, Zig, D, etc. The user space drivers and services can also be written in any language as well as the programs accessing them. 9P is machine agnostic so a Plan 9 network can be made of disparate machine architectures letting you mix x86, Arm, Power, Mips, Risc-V, etc. Stupid simple cross compiling is an out of the box feature, just change the objtype env variable.
I can export those devices/services to other systems using 9P, cifs, nfs, and so on. I can export the sound device of a Plan 9 machine using cifs to a Windows box and a Windows program could open that file and play sound by writing 16bit stereo audio to it.
Your data structures are then pretty strait forward, e.g audio(3): "Audio data is a sequence of stereo samples, left sample first. Each sample is a 16 bit little-endian two's complement integer; the default sampling rate is 44.1 kHz." http://man.postnix.pw/9front/3/audio
It's a fantastic concept which frees all the services and hardware from the confines of a old school POSIX/Unix machine. Since Plan 9 in NOT Unix you also don't have to worry about crusty old POSIX. It has its own C dialect that is mostly C99 compliant and a very nice C library that beats smelly old ANSI C. I highly recommend learning how it works and giving it a go. Its not for everyone but man, I really dig how its just a patch-bay of networked 9P stuff. Wiring up a network of machines and hardware is ezpz.
I was always fascinated by plan 9 ever since finding out about it and only ever having heard of the movie referenced in Seinfeld. Way back then I didn’t think it would keep seeing use and development, I’m glad I’m wrong :)
Yes, we really really need to do this. It would be what LLVM was for compiler frontends (and thus languages) starting 15-20 years ago: a Cambrian explosion enabler.
I regularly see articles pop in here about OS development happening in China but I find it very hard to find resource in English about what’s actually happening.
Could anyone give an overview of what Huawei and Vivo are doing? I understand it’s mostly RTOS to use on phone. How does it compare to QNX and Linux? Is it as ambitious as Fuchsia?
Apparently they are shipping. It’s weird that we have reached a point where there seem to be two worlds not talking to each other much.
I think there might be more of this coming. The era where US was leading everything and expecting everyone to be a good boy who report everything is long gone due to the current state of affairs in the tech world.
I'm not Chinese but I can only support such efforts that make everyone less reliable on main actors. That said they even share their work so it's not like they are going full mute.
China's emergence was inevitable - they have the numbers. Last one I heard was 200 million people in STEM careers alone. That's more than the entire US workforce.
I expect technological development to explode and my advice is for anyone interested in it to learn Mandarin. Including myself.
> development happening in China but I find it very hard to find resource in English about what’s actually happening.
For years I've had this issue with pretty much everything happening in China, from business to politics to culture. For me personally, getting a window into China has been the number one game changer with LLMs. It's easier than ever to find and digest Chinese sources.
I feel like this a problem in general for topics outside “the West” or even just the Anglosphere. There is a tantalising amount of information that is siloed away in other languages. I was reading a Wikipedia article on one of the campaigns waged by the Ottomans in Europe and the English version was threadbare (and poorly written) in comparison to the Hungarian Wikipedia equivalent which was three times longer and had more images, maps and diagrams. It also cited a wealth of sources that were, again, not in English. This is a natural result of the fact that the ones “closest” to the event in question will generally be the ones most qualified and ready to report upon it.
Paradoxically (or not) this is precisely what makes their scholarship better than that of a “distant” observer. The problem is that truly neutral authors are also often indifferent ones. Since the Ottomans had such a large influence on the history of Hungary, the scholars of that nation are far more interested in that topic and therefore will study and research it to a much greater level of detail than a scholar working in English from the Anglo cultural sphere where that history is less relevant to them. Also “distant” observers will lack a lot of the context necessary to interpret the events and topics in question. The best books on the American Civil War will be written by American scholars working in English, their biases notwithstanding. To make matters worse there is a natural human bias rooted in in-group vs out-group psychology where information provided by an out-group (information in a foreign language) is viewed with more scepticism than that provided by an in-group, even when the topic at hand concerns the out-group.
I'm not sure what the parent poster is getting at about information on Chinese business, politics and culture being hard to find because that stuff is widely written about in the global media, and there are plenty of English language sources. It almost seems counterproductive to provide links to resources because it's artificially limiting what you will be exposed to, but here we go anyway...
On the state-owned media tip there are also more blatant propaganda outlets like Global Times, People's Daily etc, plus private-owned media that largely toe the party line like South China Morning Post.
There are also a set of mostly US-based thinktanks that do solid macro-level reporting on geopolitical and economic issues, guys like Jamestown, CSIS, German Marshall Fund etc.
Then there are countless blogs and newsletters and influencers who report on specific niches, everything from economic analysis to boyslove fandom... You can jump on Bilibili to watch shows and see all the "bullet chat" jargon and memes, you can rub shoulders with the upper middle class on Xiaohongshu, read millions of Steam reviews or check out the forums of games popular in China, follow ABC or expat channels on YouTube etc. I find it very hard to believe that people in 2025 can't find any information about what's going on in China.
All that said, I do share the sense that there is a bit a trough between Chinese tech workers and foreign tech workers, and it's because most Chinese tech workers don't tend to prioritize learning English to the same degree that tech workers around the rest of the world do. There are lots of publications that report on the Chinese tech industry from an investor or economic perspective, probably written by all those MBAs who went to study overseas, but nerd-to-nerd level exchange is lacking imo. I suppose you could ask an LLM to summarize content from v2ex.com (HN-ish Reddit), tieba.baidu.com (Reddit-ish Reddit), segmentfault.com (StackOverflow) etc, but that doesn't really do much to engage in a social way so I'm not sure if it's what you're looking for. Chinese-language Github projects are one place you could explore, if you specifically want to interact with developers over there.
> I regularly see articles pop in here about OS development happening in China but I find it very hard to find resource in English
It's challenging for open source communities in the west to collaborate with their counterparts in China primarily because of language, but also the collaborations can't really happen in the public places that we're all used to. Western social platforms are blocked in China, and Chinese social platforms are not appealing to the west for one reason or another. Even places like Github are frequently blocked on partially inaccessible in China.
So there really just isn't any good place for people to meet and collaborate, and learn from each other.
It's even harder to get an accurate picture of what Chinese companies are actually doing. Like the wiki page for Huawei's OS Next is pretty incredible. By which I mean, rather actually unbelievable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT
They created a brand new microkernel with Linux ABI and driver support in containers? Or... did they just slightly fork Linux and pretend they invented it?
Wait, doesn't that also pretty obviously say it's not a microkernel at all? They use "class 1 mechanism-enforced isolation" which isn't address space space isolation per the paper, and thus they solved ipc performance by not having any ipc - it's monolithic
Well, it is clear that they have a new definition of a microkernel, since there are now more new technologies that achieve isolation without compromising performance. Microkernel vs monolithic kernel is more of a marketing rhetoric than technical differences.
> Microkernel vs monolithic kernel is more of a marketing rhetoric than technical differences.
It's not, they have meanings and they can't just make up something different and pretend it's a microkernel when it isn't. That doesn't make it bad, it's just not what they are claiming. It also obviously isn't IPC, despite their continued use of the term throughout.
Also their isolation says it's ARM Watchpoint which is a debugger support? Maybe they are trapping unexpected address writes, but that isn't doing much for restricting privileges. It also lists Intel PKS, which Linux already supports/uses as well...
You can read the slide deck and the paper. They are pretty transparent about what they do. The whole point is how they tried to adapt microkernel concepts while still retaining the required performance.
They address at length why they don't use a traditional IPC for the most sollicited part of the kernel.
It being or not being a microkernel is not in itself a very interesting take. What's interesting is how useful or not what they do is.
Having used HarmonyOS, it feels totally like Android. Even the back buttom behavior and the app lifecycle feels the same.
Some might argue that this is intentional, but to me, this more likely shows that HarmonyOS is just a hard fork of Android without sources released and, likely, with their own virtual machine implementation (ARK instead of ART).
Looks shockingly similar to Android Studio including the exact same program layout on the filesystem and SDK compatibility selection.
ArkTS itself looks new enough, but if it turns out to just be something like Flutter, running on an otherwise Android OS, that doesn't look like it would be surprising
Not surprising, all embeded IDEs used to look like Eclipse CDT, nowadays they all look like VSCode forks, at least they aren't shipping yet another Chrome Platform Runtime based IDE.
And Flutter was initially based in React before adopting Dart, while Compose was Android's team response to the internal turf wars at Google.
It is to be expected that when forced to not use Android any longer due to politics, they would make a platform that eases the effort of developers with Android skills to transition to a new platform free of US politics.
Seeing Illumos lx-branded zones and WSL1, I think it is plausible that this actually does that. It is less research-level hard then simply requiring a lot of person-hours to slavishly reproduce an underdefined interface.
I think this comment is emblematic of a broader western trend underestimating recent Chinese technological development. It is understandable, given how backward they were for so long. The last five years though, things have really gotten crazy over there in terms of investment and progress.
Anyone claiming to have made a microkernel, seemingly quickly, with Linux ABI and driver compatibility while supposedly being 10-20% faster would also be getting the same amount of skepticism.
Especially if that was just one component of a supposedly entirely new OS that quickly replaced something decades established without regressing user experience or features
My understanding is that Harmony OS is a full fledge OS at this point. We will start hearing more about it when devs will need to support it for their mobile apps that ship to LATAM and Africa.
From their website (translated): Blue River Operating System 2 is the industry's first operating system written in the Rust language from the kernel to the system framework. A series of security features of the Rust language can detect security vulnerabilities caused by improper memory use during the compilation stage, making it inherently more secure from the source.
Harvey is Plan 9 built with a GCC/Clang tool chain instead of the Plan 9 tools. AFAIK both projects are abandoned (edit: R9 might still be alive) and most devs have moved on to 9front which is a modern fork of Plan 9.
It would be neat if there was a standard interface for device drivers, similar to what POSIX does for user-space. That way, interesting kernels like this one can just comply with that and the enormous amounts of Linux modules can be ported to comply with that standard so that they can also be loaded by redox, blueos,etc..
But the complication I suppose is data-structures being accessed by drivers that reside in the core kernel and other assumptions that come with linking against a monolith program like the Linux kernel. It would be momentous to simply get Linux drivers to comply with a kernel-agnostic ABI.
IMO, the reason we have a sea of open source drivers available now is because of the lack of a standard driver interface.
If one existed, companies would not be compelled to release their drivers' source, and would just release closed source drivers. As it stands, kernel drivers must be open source because the kernel API/ABI changes, and drivers must be recompiled against new kernel releases. It's infeasible to release a compiled driver .ko and have it work with new kernel releases.
Similarly, companies will not be incentivized to mainline their drivers for hardware outside of hobbists' interests. We're blessed with a plethora of drivers for enterprise, cloud and industry hardware that would otherwise have never been released beyond vendors' customers' deployments.
What would happen to the Linux driver ecosystem is what happened with Nintendo, Sony, Apple and FreeBSD. You get closed source drivers siloed away in proprietary systems that will never be released. The deployed drivers will come with restrictions on use and distribution, as well, so it wouldn't be like you could pluck out compatible drivers to use elsewhere.
> It's infeasible to release a compiled driver .ko and have it work with new kernel releases.
It's not. At Ksplice we had a build farm and whenever a supported distro would release a new kernel, we would generate new .ko files for that kernel, usually within 24 hours. It was a lot of work, and very much specific to the Ksplice product. These days, between docker and DKMS, and limiting yourself to supporting a specific device, you'd have a much easier time of building a build farm to release a compiled .ko, if you were a hardware manufacturer that wanted to support that.
Very cool, but I think that points to the impracticality of releasing drivers like that when it comes to distributing them to end users.
End users having to connect to the Internet to download the right drivers seems impractical?
Vendors running build farms into perpetuity so that end users can use their hardware with new kernels does seem impractical from where I'm standing, yeah.
I don't see vendors supporting their hardware for more than a few years if new kernels need new module builds regularly.
Am I misunderstanding what you were talking about?
Yeah I guess we just don't agree on what's practical. For a million dollars over the course of, let's say, five years for support, you could get someone to do this job.
AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, Virtualbox, VMware, Dell, and Realtek using DKMS for their closed source drivers today, is also where I'm coming from.
I’m confused. That fact that you had to recompile for each new kernel reinforces the quote you are seeking to challenge.
What definition of "infeasible" are you using?
I’m using the definition that something can’t be done. The comment you responded to was regarding releasing a compiled ko and having it supported by newer kernels. Your response was we solved this by recompiling it.
A specific .ko file can't work against arbitrary kernels, no. The customer problem of I have a kernel and this hardware and need a .ko file for it is solvable.
That’s great but not what the comment you responded to was regarding.
In any case, proprietary drivers would need to be distributed separately from the Linux kernel because of the GPL license.
> It would be neat if there was a standard interface for device drivers, similar to what POSIX does for user-space.
Plan 9 does this but instead of a binary interface that exposes machine details it hides them behind 9P, a simple RPC file tree protocol. This same protocol is also served by user space programs so it's universal. The benefit of all this is the system is small and very light weight. Its an OS a single human can grok from kernel to user space.
Since 9p abstracts everything it's kernel and language agnostic. A Plan 9 kernel can be written in Rust and serve the same 9P tree to a Plan 9 written in C, Go, Zig, D, etc. The user space drivers and services can also be written in any language as well as the programs accessing them. 9P is machine agnostic so a Plan 9 network can be made of disparate machine architectures letting you mix x86, Arm, Power, Mips, Risc-V, etc. Stupid simple cross compiling is an out of the box feature, just change the objtype env variable.
I can export those devices/services to other systems using 9P, cifs, nfs, and so on. I can export the sound device of a Plan 9 machine using cifs to a Windows box and a Windows program could open that file and play sound by writing 16bit stereo audio to it.
Your data structures are then pretty strait forward, e.g audio(3): "Audio data is a sequence of stereo samples, left sample first. Each sample is a 16 bit little-endian two's complement integer; the default sampling rate is 44.1 kHz." http://man.postnix.pw/9front/3/audio
It's a fantastic concept which frees all the services and hardware from the confines of a old school POSIX/Unix machine. Since Plan 9 in NOT Unix you also don't have to worry about crusty old POSIX. It has its own C dialect that is mostly C99 compliant and a very nice C library that beats smelly old ANSI C. I highly recommend learning how it works and giving it a go. Its not for everyone but man, I really dig how its just a patch-bay of networked 9P stuff. Wiring up a network of machines and hardware is ezpz.
I was always fascinated by plan 9 ever since finding out about it and only ever having heard of the movie referenced in Seinfeld. Way back then I didn’t think it would keep seeing use and development, I’m glad I’m wrong :)
Yes, we really really need to do this. It would be what LLVM was for compiler frontends (and thus languages) starting 15-20 years ago: a Cambrian explosion enabler.
LLVM might be the most sucessful one, but it hardly the first of its kind.
Here one famous one from early 1980s, there others to read about, for anyone into compiler tooling history,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Compiler_Kit
Thanks, that is some nice history
Maybe hardware should start offering virtio interfaces
No standard interface but open documentation suitable for developers and an attempt to minimize differences
Besides any technical issues, the issue in the Linux world is FOSS religion.
Most other OSes have had driver ABIs throughout all their existence.
I regularly see articles pop in here about OS development happening in China but I find it very hard to find resource in English about what’s actually happening.
Could anyone give an overview of what Huawei and Vivo are doing? I understand it’s mostly RTOS to use on phone. How does it compare to QNX and Linux? Is it as ambitious as Fuchsia?
Apparently they are shipping. It’s weird that we have reached a point where there seem to be two worlds not talking to each other much.
I think there might be more of this coming. The era where US was leading everything and expecting everyone to be a good boy who report everything is long gone due to the current state of affairs in the tech world.
I'm not Chinese but I can only support such efforts that make everyone less reliable on main actors. That said they even share their work so it's not like they are going full mute.
China's emergence was inevitable - they have the numbers. Last one I heard was 200 million people in STEM careers alone. That's more than the entire US workforce.
I expect technological development to explode and my advice is for anyone interested in it to learn Mandarin. Including myself.
> I expect technological development to explode and my advice is for anyone interested in it to learn Mandarin. Including myself.
My father said the exact same thing in the 80's but it was Japanese.
China’s prospects are mic better - like I said, they have the numbers to outperform everyone else. Japan was a completely different case.
> development happening in China but I find it very hard to find resource in English about what’s actually happening.
For years I've had this issue with pretty much everything happening in China, from business to politics to culture. For me personally, getting a window into China has been the number one game changer with LLMs. It's easier than ever to find and digest Chinese sources.
I feel like this a problem in general for topics outside “the West” or even just the Anglosphere. There is a tantalising amount of information that is siloed away in other languages. I was reading a Wikipedia article on one of the campaigns waged by the Ottomans in Europe and the English version was threadbare (and poorly written) in comparison to the Hungarian Wikipedia equivalent which was three times longer and had more images, maps and diagrams. It also cited a wealth of sources that were, again, not in English. This is a natural result of the fact that the ones “closest” to the event in question will generally be the ones most qualified and ready to report upon it.
> the fact that the ones “closest” to the event in question will generally be the ones most qualified and ready to report upon it.
Or are the most motivated to push a narrative in relation to it.
Paradoxically (or not) this is precisely what makes their scholarship better than that of a “distant” observer. The problem is that truly neutral authors are also often indifferent ones. Since the Ottomans had such a large influence on the history of Hungary, the scholars of that nation are far more interested in that topic and therefore will study and research it to a much greater level of detail than a scholar working in English from the Anglo cultural sphere where that history is less relevant to them. Also “distant” observers will lack a lot of the context necessary to interpret the events and topics in question. The best books on the American Civil War will be written by American scholars working in English, their biases notwithstanding. To make matters worse there is a natural human bias rooted in in-group vs out-group psychology where information provided by an out-group (information in a foreign language) is viewed with more scepticism than that provided by an in-group, even when the topic at hand concerns the out-group.
I am Hungarian, and lord, our history is really damn extensive (for a country of this size). I can see why it would be 3 times longer. :)
> For years I've had this issue with pretty much everything happening in China, from business to politics to culture
China is mindblowingly huge. There has to be A LOT happening at any one time.
Do you have any resources (search engines, prompts, MCP, other tools) to help with this?
I feel that it is quite obvious the next century will have China leading the pack, and I'd really like to be able to prepare for that.
I'm not sure what the parent poster is getting at about information on Chinese business, politics and culture being hard to find because that stuff is widely written about in the global media, and there are plenty of English language sources. It almost seems counterproductive to provide links to resources because it's artificially limiting what you will be exposed to, but here we go anyway...
China Media Project (media analysis) - https://chinamediaproject.org/
China Leadership Monitor (political analysis) - https://www.prcleader.org/
Made in China Journal (social analysis) - https://madeinchinajournal.com/
What's on Weibo (pop culture reporting) - https://www.whatsonweibo.com/
The China Project (formerly SupChina, general reporting) - https://thechinaproject.com/
* edit to add: seems like The China Project shut down end of 2023, but leaving the link for context
Sixth Tone (state-owned media specializing in human interest stories) - https://www.sixthtone.com/
On the state-owned media tip there are also more blatant propaganda outlets like Global Times, People's Daily etc, plus private-owned media that largely toe the party line like South China Morning Post.
There are also a set of mostly US-based thinktanks that do solid macro-level reporting on geopolitical and economic issues, guys like Jamestown, CSIS, German Marshall Fund etc.
Then there are countless blogs and newsletters and influencers who report on specific niches, everything from economic analysis to boyslove fandom... You can jump on Bilibili to watch shows and see all the "bullet chat" jargon and memes, you can rub shoulders with the upper middle class on Xiaohongshu, read millions of Steam reviews or check out the forums of games popular in China, follow ABC or expat channels on YouTube etc. I find it very hard to believe that people in 2025 can't find any information about what's going on in China.
All that said, I do share the sense that there is a bit a trough between Chinese tech workers and foreign tech workers, and it's because most Chinese tech workers don't tend to prioritize learning English to the same degree that tech workers around the rest of the world do. There are lots of publications that report on the Chinese tech industry from an investor or economic perspective, probably written by all those MBAs who went to study overseas, but nerd-to-nerd level exchange is lacking imo. I suppose you could ask an LLM to summarize content from v2ex.com (HN-ish Reddit), tieba.baidu.com (Reddit-ish Reddit), segmentfault.com (StackOverflow) etc, but that doesn't really do much to engage in a social way so I'm not sure if it's what you're looking for. Chinese-language Github projects are one place you could explore, if you specifically want to interact with developers over there.
Thank you for the link to V2ex.com!
Their comments section has
Please do not copy and paste AI-generated content when answering technical questions
on their footer.
> I regularly see articles pop in here about OS development happening in China but I find it very hard to find resource in English
It's challenging for open source communities in the west to collaborate with their counterparts in China primarily because of language, but also the collaborations can't really happen in the public places that we're all used to. Western social platforms are blocked in China, and Chinese social platforms are not appealing to the west for one reason or another. Even places like Github are frequently blocked on partially inaccessible in China.
So there really just isn't any good place for people to meet and collaborate, and learn from each other.
It's even harder to get an accurate picture of what Chinese companies are actually doing. Like the wiki page for Huawei's OS Next is pretty incredible. By which I mean, rather actually unbelievable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT
They created a brand new microkernel with Linux ABI and driver support in containers? Or... did they just slightly fork Linux and pretend they invented it?
They published a paper for it, which includes more details. https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-h...
Wait, doesn't that also pretty obviously say it's not a microkernel at all? They use "class 1 mechanism-enforced isolation" which isn't address space space isolation per the paper, and thus they solved ipc performance by not having any ipc - it's monolithic
Well, it is clear that they have a new definition of a microkernel, since there are now more new technologies that achieve isolation without compromising performance. Microkernel vs monolithic kernel is more of a marketing rhetoric than technical differences.
> Microkernel vs monolithic kernel is more of a marketing rhetoric than technical differences.
It's not, they have meanings and they can't just make up something different and pretend it's a microkernel when it isn't. That doesn't make it bad, it's just not what they are claiming. It also obviously isn't IPC, despite their continued use of the term throughout.
Also their isolation says it's ARM Watchpoint which is a debugger support? Maybe they are trapping unexpected address writes, but that isn't doing much for restricting privileges. It also lists Intel PKS, which Linux already supports/uses as well...
You can read the slide deck and the paper. They are pretty transparent about what they do. The whole point is how they tried to adapt microkernel concepts while still retaining the required performance.
They address at length why they don't use a traditional IPC for the most sollicited part of the kernel.
It being or not being a microkernel is not in itself a very interesting take. What's interesting is how useful or not what they do is.
Having used HarmonyOS, it feels totally like Android. Even the back buttom behavior and the app lifecycle feels the same.
Some might argue that this is intentional, but to me, this more likely shows that HarmonyOS is just a hard fork of Android without sources released and, likely, with their own virtual machine implementation (ARK instead of ART).
It is more than that, because it uses neither Java nor Kotlin, the main programming language is inspired in Typescript, ArkTS.
And yet https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/en/doc/harmonyos-guide...
Looks shockingly similar to Android Studio including the exact same program layout on the filesystem and SDK compatibility selection.
ArkTS itself looks new enough, but if it turns out to just be something like Flutter, running on an otherwise Android OS, that doesn't look like it would be surprising
Not surprising, all embeded IDEs used to look like Eclipse CDT, nowadays they all look like VSCode forks, at least they aren't shipping yet another Chrome Platform Runtime based IDE.
And Flutter was initially based in React before adopting Dart, while Compose was Android's team response to the internal turf wars at Google.
It is to be expected that when forced to not use Android any longer due to politics, they would make a platform that eases the effort of developers with Android skills to transition to a new platform free of US politics.
Harmony OS 1-4 were openly Android-based. It's Harmony OS 5 that supposedly is this new thing. Which did you use?
Permanent link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/1302072064
Seeing Illumos lx-branded zones and WSL1, I think it is plausible that this actually does that. It is less research-level hard then simply requiring a lot of person-hours to slavishly reproduce an underdefined interface.
I think this comment is emblematic of a broader western trend underestimating recent Chinese technological development. It is understandable, given how backward they were for so long. The last five years though, things have really gotten crazy over there in terms of investment and progress.
Anyone claiming to have made a microkernel, seemingly quickly, with Linux ABI and driver compatibility while supposedly being 10-20% faster would also be getting the same amount of skepticism.
Especially if that was just one component of a supposedly entirely new OS that quickly replaced something decades established without regressing user experience or features
Huawei created and are currently shipping a microkernel OS not just on phones but in routers, appliances, vehicles.
https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-h...
My understanding is that Harmony OS is a full fledge OS at this point. We will start hearing more about it when devs will need to support it for their mobile apps that ship to LATAM and Africa.
It's time to learn Chinese. Especially with advances in RISC-V
A bit funny since logographic languages are the original CISC.
/offtop, but could not help... Optimists learn English, pessimists learn Chinese, realists learn AK-74 (or M-16 or whatever one's military is using).
From their website (translated): Blue River Operating System 2 is the industry's first operating system written in the Rust language from the kernel to the system framework. A series of security features of the Rust language can detect security vulnerabilities caused by improper memory use during the compilation stage, making it inherently more secure from the source.
Wasnt Harvey OS written in Rust?
And https://www.redox-os.org?
No, that's R9: https://github.com/r9os/r9 (edit: proper r9 project link)
Harvey is Plan 9 built with a GCC/Clang tool chain instead of the Plan 9 tools. AFAIK both projects are abandoned (edit: R9 might still be alive) and most devs have moved on to 9front which is a modern fork of Plan 9.
It appears there's a book? How can I see it without compiling it?
I don't think there's really a book yet, at least in English.
https://github.com/vivoblueos/book/blob/main/src/SUMMARY.md
All of these repos are days old.
Click the link to the book, then open up the src directory, it's all md files (in english).
How does this compare to asterinas in terms of progress?