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.
HarmonyOS Next (which I guess is 5). A chinese guy I met at the airport showed to me very proudly how amazing Chinese-made tech was. I will say the software looked polished enough and surprisingly good, yet it felt totally just like a hard android-based OS (which I bet it is).
Some might argue that the software has enough changes in it to be considered a distinct OS, but I'd rather just call it a hard fork as I had the impression that this was a more accurate depiction of what's really going on behind the scenes.
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
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?