Huawei operating system "HarmonyOS OS" unveiled.
Huawei’s self-developed operating system has finally been unveiled.
On August 9th, Huawei Consumer Business officially released its brand-new distributed operating system "HarmonyOS OS" based on microkernel and facing all scenarios to the whole world at its global developer conference.
Huawei said that HarmonyOS OS is the product of welcoming the era of full-scene experience, and will give full play to its advantages of lightweight, compact and powerful functions, and take the lead in applying it to smart terminals such as smart watches, smart screens, vehicle-mounted equipment and smart speakers, and strive to build a cross-terminal integration and sharing ecosystem, reshape a safe and reliable operating environment, and create a new experience of full-scene smart life for consumers. In other words, Huawei’s smart terminal will use its own operating system in the future.
"As early as ten years ago, Huawei began to think about facing the future era of full-scenario wisdom. Users need a new experience that is cross-hardware, cross-platform and seamless, which completely breaks through the physical space." Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei’s consumer business, said when introducing the original intention of HarmonyOS’s OS development: "With the advent of the era of full-scenario wisdom, Huawei believes that it is necessary to further improve the cross-platform capability of the operating system, including the ability to support full-scenario, cross-device and platform, and the ability to cope with low latency and high security challenges. Therefore, the embryonic form of HarmonyOS OS has gradually formed. It can be said that the starting point of HarmonyOS OS is different from Android and iOS. It is a brand-new distributed operating system based on microkernel and facing the whole scene, which can meet the requirements of smooth experience of the whole scene, trusted security at the architecture level, seamless collaboration across terminals and multi-terminal deployment at one time. HarmonyOS should be born in the future. "
According to Huawei, HarmonyOS OS is designed to meet the high-standard connection requirements of intelligent experience in the whole scene, and it has four system solutions.
First of all, the distributed architecture is used for terminal OS for the first time, which can realize seamless collaborative experience across terminals. HarmonyOS OS’s "Distributed OS Architecture" and "Distributed Soft Bus Technology" shield the application developers from the realization difficulty of the underlying technology of the corresponding distributed application through the four capabilities of public communication platform, distributed data management, distributed capability scheduling and virtual peripherals, so that developers can focus on their own business logic and develop cross-terminal distributed applications like developing the same terminal, and also enable the end consumers to enjoy the seamless experience brought by the powerful cross-terminal business collaboration capability for various usage scenarios.
Secondly, it is determined that the delay engine and high-performance IPC technology can realize the natural fluency of the system. HarmonyOS OS solves the problem of insufficient performance of the existing system by using two technologies: deterministic delay engine and high-performance IPC. The delay engine can allocate the priority and time limit of task execution in the system for scheduling before task execution, and the task resources with high priority will give priority to scheduling, and the application response delay will be reduced by 25.7%. The compact structure of HarmonyOS microkernel greatly improves the performance of IPC (Inter-process Communication), and the efficiency of inter-process communication is 5 times higher than that of the existing system.
Thirdly, remould the trustworthiness and security of terminal equipment based on microkernel architecture. HarmonyOS OS adopts a brand-new microkernel design, which has stronger security features and low latency. The basic idea of microkernel design is to simplify the kernel function, realize system services as much as possible in the user mode outside the kernel, and add mutual security protection. Microkernel only provides the most basic services, such as multi-process scheduling and multi-process communication.
HarmonyOS OS applies microkernel technology to trusted execution environment (TEE), and reconstructs trusted security through formal methods. Formal method is an effective means to verify the correctness and no loopholes of the system from the source by mathematical methods. Traditional verification methods, such as functional verification and simulated attack, can only be verified in selected limited scenarios, while formal methods can verify all software running paths through data models. HarmonyOS OS applies formal method to terminal TEE for the first time, which significantly improves the security level. At the same time, because the code amount of HarmonyOS OS microkernel is only one thousandth of that of Linux macro kernel, its attack probability is also greatly reduced.
Finally, the unified IDE supports one-time development and multi-terminal deployment to realize cross-terminal ecological sharing. HarmonyOS OS relies on multi-terminal development IDE, multi-language unified compilation, distributed architecture Kit to provide screen layout controls and automatic adaptation of interaction, support control drag and drop, and preview-oriented visual programming, so that developers can efficiently build multi-terminal automatic running App based on the same project, realize real one-time development and multi-terminal deployment, and realize sharing ecology among devices. Huawei Ark Compiler is the first static compiler to replace Android virtual machine mode, which allows developers to compile high-level languages into machine code at one time in the development environment. In addition, Ark compiler will support multilingual unified compilation in the future, which can greatly improve the development efficiency.
Huawei also announced the evolution roadmap of HarmonyOS kernel and OS, and will take the lead in using HarmonyOS OS 1.0 in the smart screen products launched this year. In the next three years, in addition to improving related technologies, HarmonyOS OS will be gradually applied to more intelligent devices such as wearable devices, smart screens and car machines.
At the same time, in order to rapidly promote the ecological development of OS in HarmonyOS, HarmonyOS OS will open its source to developers all over the world, and promote the establishment of an open source foundation and an open source community, so as to jointly promote the development of HarmonyOS with developers and make suggestions on industrial or technological development through discussion.
Yu Chengdong believes that China already has a sound application ecology and a huge user base. In the future, Huawei will rely on China to build the HarmonyOS OS ecosystem globally. By focusing on new values, it will open up its core capabilities in communication, photography, full scene and AI, and work with ecological partners from all walks of life to create applications and services with better consumer experience, inject new vitality into the industry, and create a new experience and ecology with full scene intelligence. "We believe that the launch of HarmonyOS OS will greatly enhance the vitality and ecology of the industry. We welcome global developers to actively support HarmonyOS’s OS ecological construction and jointly create a full-scenario intelligent life experience for consumers. ".