Conversation

Jonathan Corbet

Not quite sure what to make of this:

https://www.huaweicentral.com/harmonyos-next-is-true-operating-system-with-self-developed-components-huawei-ceo/

"Eventually, HarmonyOS NEXT is not an Android skin but a true OS. It doesn’t run on a primitive Linux Kernel that’s used to bind the operating system in the U.S. hands."

It's also evidently "three times more efficient than Linux"

https://www.huaweicentral.com/huaweis-self-developed-harmony-kernel-is-3-times-more-efficient-than-linux/

It must certainly be good stuff! I'm not finding a repository link, though.
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@corbet not sure how much work "eventually" is doing there, but it might be a lot?

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@corbet primitive Linux kernel? :( cc @ptesarik
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@vbabka @ptesarik @corbet probably "primitive" in the sense of being a fundamental building block rather than a high-level application component?

But if the intent really was to mean "old and backward" in a pejorative sense, well... pretty difficult to take that seriously.

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@gnomon @vbabka @corbet I don't know much about HarmonyOS. After all, I am only an external consultant, and the team I work with is an open-source oddity…

However, the Linux kernel may be actually old and backward. Someone came up with that theory some 30 years ago—er, what was his name? Andrew S. Tanenbaum?

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@ptesarik sure, "old" is definitely accurate at this point and you won't find me defending the design elegance of a monolithic kernel aimed at underpinning POSIX. But in terms of industrial engineering and serving the purpose of being a general purpose, performant system component that scales down to (what we currently call) microcontrollers and up to HPC workloads from a mostly unified codebase?

I don't know, man. There's a lot of room to win in narrowed domain constraints, but in general..?

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@gnomon All right, we don't know each other, so I should have avoided sarcasm. You should always take my words with a grain of salt.

You certainly know that HarmonyOS can actually run a Linux kernel if that's the best option for the target device. I could believe that Huawei's hypervisor is 3 times more efficient than Linux with KVM, but it's not quite clear to me what those numbers mean. Too little technical details there.

And no, I don't have access to the hypervisor source repo.

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@corbet you missed the bit where Huawei says Linux cements US control. They obviously don't pay attention to who develops Linux and where do they come from.

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@jejb @corbet yeah, although Linus @torvalds himself is in the US, he barely has any power these days.
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@corbet you can see on wikipedia this is all about getting around possible sanctions which would prevent them from using android. The rest is political/marketing fluff. And in any case it uses a compatibility layer so that 'primitive' apps can run on it 🤣

Luckily I am a primitive developer so linux suits me down to the ground
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@vbabka @jejb @corbet @torvalds you sir, win the internet
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@jejb Didn't miss it, even quoted a bit of it.

The funny thing being, of course, that Huawai pretty much always appears in the top-ten companies supporting kernel development:

https://lwn.net/Articles/956765/

...so they can't be entirely clueless about its origins...
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@corbet @jejb Like all big companies, Huawei consists of several divisions, which work against, next, and with each other?

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