HarmonyOS is a modern (post-Liedtke) microkernel, multi-server OS.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world is stuck with the likes of Linux (monolithic), Windows NT (ugly hybrid) and MacOS (pre-liedtke Mach, hybrid, ugly).
Good technology exists (e.g. seL4, genode, RISC-V) but we seem to be stuck investing into bad tech.
notyourwork · 10h ago
Without disagreeing, can you tell me what makes this a game changer? How would I apply this in my personal life or at work?
chvid · 7h ago
Modern microkernels deliver stability, security, performance (look it up if you want the details). Back when I did CS we were talking about this as the next big thing in operating systems. It didn't happen - common operating systems instead expanded in scope, started to include things like a web browser and supporting a gazallion pieces of hardware, rather than trying to "do things right".
The game changer part is of course in terms of the broader tech war. What we have here might be a consumer operating system that is technologically better than what is on offer from Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Built by a vilified Chinese company.
StopDisinfo910 · 6h ago
This is not a game changer. Microkernels have been a reality for ages. See QNX or even Fuchsia. I don’t know what "modern" microkernel means. The architectural concepts haven’t changed.
There are reasons nobody uses true microkernels. IPCs are slow and the gains are limited compared to the strategies all broadly used kernels already use. They are no monolithic kernel anymore. Everyone has slowly but surely been shifting more and more things to user space in isolated processes including Linux and Windows.
Hongmeng might be an interesting kernel. It might also not be. Sadly its proprietary and there are very little benchmarks not published by Huawei. Personally I won’t hold my breath for this one.
chvid · 5h ago
Sorry. Of course you right - the game changing part is that there is now an advanced consumer os that is owned by a Chinese company - it being micro kernel is a small part but important.
snvzz · 4h ago
>IPCs are slow and the gains are limited compared to the strategies all broadly used kernels already use.
The problem you are describing is a characteristic of 1st generation microkernels, and was solved by Jochen Liedtke in the mid 90s, introducing 2nd generation microkernels.
seL4 is a 3rd generation microkernel.
>I don’t know what "modern" microkernel means.
To get up to date, a good resource is Gernot Heiser's blog[0], read from oldest to newest.
It’s not about being up to date. What you call modern here is just recent. It doesn’t fundamentally diverge from the historical architecture.
Even SeL4 fast IPC which is not actually a full IPC but works well in the barebone context of SeL4 remains in fact slower than good old syscalls.
The fundamental question remains the same “Is this worse the costs (in terms of both efficiency and design complexity)?”
To me, the answer is muddy here. Sometimes yes, sometimes probably not. I think it’s why hybrid approaches are now generalised but no one is really shipping a microkernel outside of industrial applications.
echelon · 13h ago
We should have known that if we limited China from accessing our tech, they'd just grow their own.
The game is afoot, and China knew to de-risk and decouple. I don't think that it can be stopped at this point.
HarmonyOS, RISC-V, DeepSeek, domestic EUV, etc. China is standing up its own tech pillars.
So I suppose American lawmakers see this as a game of slowing down the competition rather than fully impeding it. China will eventually route around every road block, so the question is whether or not any of this will help America keep an edge, or if that edge will even matter.
In the meantime, we're holding up our own tech giants up to antirust scrutiny (and rightly so). But does that also hinder America's lead on China? And, if so, what will that mean for the tech/AI race?
Europe is also hell-bent on slowing down American tech. Again, rightly so - data sovereignty is important, and anti-competitive, monopolistic behaviors have long stifled domestic industry and talent. American giants shouldn't be allowed to behave that way as guests in other peoples' homes.
Havoc · 11h ago
Big part of anti trust is because it crushes healthy competition so don’t think that is necessarily incompatible with winning tech races.
> China will eventually route around every road block, so the question is whether or not any of this will help America keep an edge
I’d say the lead is so slim it’s basically already gone. At least in the practical sense. If you were to isolate both right now. Cut them both off from the outside. One would be able to produce a modern cellphone the other would not.
Any sort of residual technical lead in the pure IP/knowledge sense is good for 3 years max I reckon.
h4kunamata · 11h ago
When you prevent somebody from accessing what is out there, they release their own.
The problem with that??
Well, only they mastered it since it was developed with local tech, by the time the goods are sent worldwide, you are blindfolded.
Still, I would never buy a Chinese tech device, you are buying a surveillance system to allow its government to spy on you.
supermatt · 6h ago
> I would never buy a Chinese tech device, you are buying a surveillance system to allow its government to spy on you.
There is no public evidence that Chinese consumer tech has ever been used to spy for the Chinese government. None. Meanwhile, the USA has been caught running mass surveillance programmes like PRISM and tapping the phones of its own allies. That is confirmed. And yet it is the USA making the most noise, spreading fear about Chinese tech. People only seem to worry when the device doesn’t have a US brand on it. You can be a patriot, but don’t be naïve. Believing unproven claims while ignoring confirmed facts is not critical thinking.
xrhobo · 48m ago
Your a complete and utter fool
the_third_wave · 2h ago
O you sweet summer child, think of why there is no public evidence on Chinese espionage while you can easily rattle off a laundry list of Western espionage programs and you'll realise your mistake: China is a closed society without public inquiry while most of the West hangs its dirty laundry out for all to see and comment upon. Look under the cover of that Xiongmai camera, that Huawei base station or those Chinese inverters and you'll find plenty of remote access and control facilities which no doubt were left there purely by accident.
Won't claim to be an expert but there were many high profile stories of china breaking up or otherwise limiting their biggest tech companies. Why would the US not propping theirs up hinder america's lead?
Teever · 12h ago
> We should have known that if we limited China from accessing our tech, they'd just grow their own.
It was known and was accounted for.
The idea is to make them spend resources developing their own technology on our terms instead of their own.
They were always going to do this, they just had to do it faster than they otherwise wanted to, which has an opportunity cost.
Qem · 11h ago
> They were always going to do this, they just had to do it faster than they otherwise wanted to, which has an opportunity cost.
It will pay itself and offset those costs once they reach breakeven and start selling their equal or better tech in the international market, displacing the incumbents.
Teever · 11h ago
If that was the case then they would have done this work without impetus from external policy.
zamadatix · 10h ago
Not necessarily. That would imply competing with the multinational incumbents during the first trillion dollars of investment is just as easy and profitable as having the market cleared out for you because the US placed tech export bans, caps, or pricing pressures to parts of the world market (not just China alone).
Of course this doesn't automatically mean China wouldn't eventually pull ahead without the external pressure either. I'm just not as convinced it was so clearly a forced opportunity cost loss as much as something which provided a washed mix of both friction and acceleration despite assuredly preventing the US from making more money while its tech was farther ahead.
echelon · 10h ago
> opportunity cost
What was the opportunity cost in this equation? A substantially smaller bailout for their commercial real estate market?
> [The idea is to make them spend resources developing their own technology] on our terms (emphasis added)
What terms did we dictate? Timelines? Trade?
How does America or the West emerge ahead here?
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 12h ago
I hope Europe figures it out too
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 12h ago
Completely new kernel and userspace? Wonder how long until it's Tier 1 or Tier 2 for Rust. ... Do they use GCC in China?
Who in 1990 would have thought a Chinese telecom company would productionize it before Hurd even released 1.0
Not laptops
HarmonyOS is a modern (post-Liedtke) microkernel, multi-server OS.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world is stuck with the likes of Linux (monolithic), Windows NT (ugly hybrid) and MacOS (pre-liedtke Mach, hybrid, ugly).
Good technology exists (e.g. seL4, genode, RISC-V) but we seem to be stuck investing into bad tech.
The game changer part is of course in terms of the broader tech war. What we have here might be a consumer operating system that is technologically better than what is on offer from Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Built by a vilified Chinese company.
There are reasons nobody uses true microkernels. IPCs are slow and the gains are limited compared to the strategies all broadly used kernels already use. They are no monolithic kernel anymore. Everyone has slowly but surely been shifting more and more things to user space in isolated processes including Linux and Windows.
Hongmeng might be an interesting kernel. It might also not be. Sadly its proprietary and there are very little benchmarks not published by Huawei. Personally I won’t hold my breath for this one.
The problem you are describing is a characteristic of 1st generation microkernels, and was solved by Jochen Liedtke in the mid 90s, introducing 2nd generation microkernels.
seL4 is a 3rd generation microkernel.
>I don’t know what "modern" microkernel means.
To get up to date, a good resource is Gernot Heiser's blog[0], read from oldest to newest.
0. https://microkerneldude.org/
Even SeL4 fast IPC which is not actually a full IPC but works well in the barebone context of SeL4 remains in fact slower than good old syscalls.
The fundamental question remains the same “Is this worse the costs (in terms of both efficiency and design complexity)?”
To me, the answer is muddy here. Sometimes yes, sometimes probably not. I think it’s why hybrid approaches are now generalised but no one is really shipping a microkernel outside of industrial applications.
The game is afoot, and China knew to de-risk and decouple. I don't think that it can be stopped at this point.
HarmonyOS, RISC-V, DeepSeek, domestic EUV, etc. China is standing up its own tech pillars.
So I suppose American lawmakers see this as a game of slowing down the competition rather than fully impeding it. China will eventually route around every road block, so the question is whether or not any of this will help America keep an edge, or if that edge will even matter.
In the meantime, we're holding up our own tech giants up to antirust scrutiny (and rightly so). But does that also hinder America's lead on China? And, if so, what will that mean for the tech/AI race?
Europe is also hell-bent on slowing down American tech. Again, rightly so - data sovereignty is important, and anti-competitive, monopolistic behaviors have long stifled domestic industry and talent. American giants shouldn't be allowed to behave that way as guests in other peoples' homes.
> China will eventually route around every road block, so the question is whether or not any of this will help America keep an edge
I’d say the lead is so slim it’s basically already gone. At least in the practical sense. If you were to isolate both right now. Cut them both off from the outside. One would be able to produce a modern cellphone the other would not.
Any sort of residual technical lead in the pure IP/knowledge sense is good for 3 years max I reckon.
Still, I would never buy a Chinese tech device, you are buying a surveillance system to allow its government to spy on you.
There is no public evidence that Chinese consumer tech has ever been used to spy for the Chinese government. None. Meanwhile, the USA has been caught running mass surveillance programmes like PRISM and tapping the phones of its own allies. That is confirmed. And yet it is the USA making the most noise, spreading fear about Chinese tech. People only seem to worry when the device doesn’t have a US brand on it. You can be a patriot, but don’t be naïve. Believing unproven claims while ignoring confirmed facts is not critical thinking.
It was known and was accounted for.
The idea is to make them spend resources developing their own technology on our terms instead of their own.
They were always going to do this, they just had to do it faster than they otherwise wanted to, which has an opportunity cost.
It will pay itself and offset those costs once they reach breakeven and start selling their equal or better tech in the international market, displacing the incumbents.
Of course this doesn't automatically mean China wouldn't eventually pull ahead without the external pressure either. I'm just not as convinced it was so clearly a forced opportunity cost loss as much as something which provided a washed mix of both friction and acceleration despite assuredly preventing the US from making more money while its tech was farther ahead.
What was the opportunity cost in this equation? A substantially smaller bailout for their commercial real estate market?
> [The idea is to make them spend resources developing their own technology] on our terms (emphasis added)
What terms did we dictate? Timelines? Trade?
How does America or the West emerge ahead here?
*-unknown-linux-ohos:
> Tier: 2 (with Host Tools): aarch64-unknown-linux-ohos, armv7-unknown-linux-ohos, x86_64-unknown-linux-ohos
> Tier: 3: loongarch64-unknown-linux-ohos
OpenHarmony has no support for gcc. All the toolchains are LLVM. [2]
[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/platform-support/openharmony...
[2]: https://gitee.com/openharmony/third_party_llvm-project