Huawei's New Laptops May Run Linux, not HarmonyOS Next - OMG! Ubuntu
Is Huawei planning to ship Linux on its upcoming MateBook laptops instead of HarmonyOS NEXT? A fresh leak out of China this week suggests so. Huawei is no
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what's harmony OS?
Huawei's android skin/variant, akin to OneUI for samsung, OxygenOS for Oneplus, HyperOS for Xiaomi.
It was a skin, now its a completely different OS. The initial version, HarmonyOS, was based on Android/Linux, the new HarmonyOS Next, is a proprietary version (or successor) of HarmonyOS based on an open source project/OS, OpenHarmony. It uses a new microkernel instead of the linux kernel.
OpenHarmony is essentially an open source base for making an operating system on top. Its not like the Linux kernel, in the sense that its not just a kernel (in fact you can use the linux kernel with it), but rather a bunch of components people can build upon. And since it uses a permissive license, you can build a proprietary OS on top of it (like the HarmonyOS Next).
Huawei actually launched OpenHarmony many years back but it was not ready for phone usage yet. It was only with the launch of the 5th version that Huawei was confident enough in it to start using it on their own phones.
Do you know where to find the HongMeng kernel? I couldn't find in OpenHarmony gitee.
Unfortunately it seems to be a completely proprietary kernel. I did find a paper on it (presented by Huawei in a conference): https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-haibo
The first line of the abstract reads
This paper presents the design and implementation of HongMeng kernel (HM), a commercialized general-purpose microkernel that preserves most of the virtues of microkernels while addressing the above challenges.
Another interesting tidbit from the paper:
We started the HongMeng kernel (HM) project over 7 years ago to re-examine and retrofit the microkernel into a general OS kernel for emerging scenarios. To be practical for production deployment, HM achieves full Linux API/ABI compatibility and is capable of reusing the Linux applications and driver ecosystems such that it can run complex frameworks like AOSP [42] and OpenHarmony [35] with rich peripherals.
Yeah I only find this which is bit technical. Anything else seems marketing bs. Seems like they're making something similar to fuchsia by google but with linux abi compatibility.
Having linux shim alone makes it effectively monolithic like xnu.They even claim this by saying linux shim will hold global state in this otherwise microkernel.
Huawei’s android skin/variant
No, it's not anymore, never really was. They dropped even the last android parts from it with HarmonyOS NEXT last year.
I think it is more of a hard fork after the embargo
Not even a fork. New code.
A Huawei version of Android.
Important clarification: it's much more than this. HarmonyOS is not any more a skin or a version of Android. It's its own OS.
HarmonyOS is IMO going to do to Android what BYD has done to Tesla and VW. This is another chapter in China declaring independence from the West.
So their laptops were running Android?
Reading the article it was a closed source OS, with their own closed-source Linux-based kernel.
Their laptops were running Windows / Linux, and this article is saying that while they initially planned to shift to HarmonyOS Next, they are now likely to stay with Linux.
Also, while HarmonyOS Next is proprietary, the kernel (Hongmeng, a microkernel optimised for arm64 and with a Linux compatibility layer) and large parts of the underlying code (OpenHarmony) are open-source. Sort of like Android and AOSP. The 'optimised for arm64' thing might be why they are sticking with Linux - the laptops mostly use Intel x86 chips.
Ah that makes sense, thanks!
the laptops mostly use Intel x86 chips
I mean, I'd be happy to see them ship ARM laptops in the vein of Apple'd M chips or Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips ¯(ツ)/¯
