One second, two seconds, three seconds… Several "code farmers" from Beijing Xinchuang Enterprise sat in front of a laptop, holding their breaths and concentrating, their hearts seemed to beat at the same frequency as the second hand.
At the 14th second, the computer desktop "lit up" smoothly, and the laboratory was suddenly full of joy.
From fighting each other, to clenching their fingers into fists, Tongxin has joined forces with upstream and downstream enterprises in the industry to jointly promote the development of domestic operating systems.
In the rapid iteration of technology, the boot time of domestic operating systems has been gradually shortened, finally achieving a 14-second leap in 2022.
In March 2022, Tongfang laptops equipped with Loongson 3A5000 4-core processor, Tongxin UOS operating system, and Kunlun BIOS firmware achieved a leap in 14-second boot time, representing that the computers of "China Core" and "China Soul" are moving from "usable" to "easy to use", expanding the Chinese people’s place in the information technology industry that Intel and Microsoft have occupied for many years.
Each line of code leaping towards "14 seconds" hides the creativity and ambition of several generations of "Beijing code farmers". They represent Beijing’s "soft power", some are white-haired gentlemen who have been fighting for decades, and some are just entering the industry. The difficulties in the chain of information technology application and innovation are making key breakthroughs in their side-by-side struggles.
Loongson CPU out of the "darkest hour"
Boot speed is the first impression of computer performance to users. 10 years ago, it took 10 minutes or even longer to open a computer equipped with domestic hardware and software.
CPU (Central Processor) is the heart of the computer. If you want to speed up the computer, you must first pass this hurdle. Do Chinese people have their own CPU?
Yes. In the early morning of August 10, 2002, the computer installed with the "Loongson No. 1" CPU was successfully started, ending the history of the Chinese people relying entirely on imported CPUs to manufacture computers. In 2010, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing jointly funded the establishment of Loongson Zhongke Company, hoping that the R & D results will be accelerated and industrialized.
However, just over two years later, Longxin Zhongke fell into the "darkest moment".
The Loongson team with strong academic taste has been focusing on improving CPU performance, but has not come up with a general-purpose CPU that meets the mainstream needs of the market. The high investment in research and development has made the company’s funds tight, and even unable to pay salaries for a while, resulting in the loss of talent.
"This crisis forced us to recognize the reality." Founder Hu Weiwu realized that the R & D staff of "Shanghai" gave up the establishment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, but forgot to pay attention to the real needs of the market. In other words, although the organization has been transformed, the concept has not kept up.
Hu Weiwu, Chief Engineer and Chief Designer of Loongson, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
At that time, the mainstream CPU in the market was a multi-core design. Intel’s main focus was dual-core and quad-core. In order to be superior, Loongson started with eight cores. Hu Weiwu admitted that the premise of "more people and more power" is that everyone must be strong. Although Loongson has eight cores, the performance of each core is not as good as that of humans. Loongson’s CPU was not accepted by the market at that time, and the reason is very simple – it is not easy to use.
After several years of detours, Loongson finally put down its "body" and turned its attention to the CPU in the field of industrial control, and then successfully applied it in the field of information technology. In constant trial and error and iteration, Loongson’s revenue exceeded 100 million yuan in 2015, achieving break-even for the first time.
From 2015 to 2020, the performance of Loongson increased by 10 times, which made it possible to support 14-second boot. Tongfang’s computer, whose boot time was shortened to 14 seconds, was equipped with the CPU of the Loongson 3A5000 series, and its performance was close to the mainstream level of open market CPUs.
Domestic operating system is just emerging
For the majority of computer users, the classic icon of the Windows operating system is deeply etched in their memory. The CPU is the heart of the computer, and the operating system is the soul. If Godson is benchmarking Intel, then who can benchmark Microsoft?
In 2011, when Hu Weiwu was struggling for a higher-level CPU, Liu Wenhuan, general manager of Tongxin Software, decided to start from scratch and build a domestic operating system.
"If conquering chip technology is like climbing the Himalayas, solving the domestic operating system is exploring the Mariana Trench." Before that, he worked in an information security company for more than a decade and increasingly felt that if the operating system bottleneck could not be solved, information security could only be on paper.
In the same period, a group of software companies with the same ideals were born in China. But the ideal is full and the reality is skinny. The first wave of early adopters found that computers equipped with domestic operating systems are not only slow, but also unable to chat, work and play games as normally as Windows. Although new domestic systems continue to be launched, these software companies have fallen one after another in the face of the gap in technology and the cruel choice of the market.
Overcoming difficulties cannot be solved by one’s own efforts. To solve the user pain points of slow boot and short battery life, CPU, operating system and other industries must jointly tackle key problems.
In 2019, Tongxin Software Technology Co., Ltd., jointly established by multiple domestic operating system manufacturers, was established, headquartered in Beijing Economic Development Zone Xinchuang Park, and established technical support institutions, R & D centers, and general software and hardware adaptation centers in Wuhan, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and other places.
From fighting each other to clenching their fingers into fists, Tongxin has joined forces with upstream and downstream enterprises in the industry to jointly promote the research and development of domestic operating systems. In the rapid iteration of technology, the boot time of domestic operating systems has been shortened step by step, and finally a 14-second leap has been achieved in 2022.
"The gap between domestic operating systems and the products of top international manufacturers has narrowed from 10 years or more to three to five years," Liu Wenhuan said.
Today, the Tongxin operating system has been implemented in a number of key industries such as banks and telecom operators, and the latest home version was also unveiled at the beginning of this year. However, the new domestic operating system still faces the risk of "supply cut" in the upstream open-source community, which in turn affects the sustainable development of the industry.
"The reason is that the root community based on Linux open source systems in China is abroad." Liu Wenhuan said that the root community can help operating system manufacturers get rid of the constraints of the upstream open source community and get better protection at the level of information security. To put it figuratively, the "supply chain" should also be secure.
Two months after achieving 14-second boot, based on the world’s three major independent open-source communities, Tongxin released China’s first desktop operating system root community "Deepin Community", starting from "roots", mastering the development rights of open-source operating systems, upstream community dominance, and attracting global enthusiasts to contribute code and ideas for domestic operating systems.
"Raise" an autonomous industrial chain
In 2014, the popular Windows XP system stopped serving, and for a time, a large number of enterprises and individual users were in disarray. Although most functions can still be used normally after the shutdown, they cannot get Microsoft vulnerability patches and system upgrade support, and are vulnerable to viruses and hackers.
Six years later, Windows 10 was discontinued, and the exact same situation played out. This further stimulated Beijing’s drive to build an independent innovation industry system.
Looking back 30 years ago, Hu Weiwu, who was still a doctoral student at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, needed to use a high-performance computing machine that had just been imported from abroad for his experiments, but the computer’s password was in the hands of foreigners and needed to be monitored in a glass house.
Hu Weiwu, chief engineer of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and chief designer of Loongson, accepted an exclusive interview with CCTV
This picture was deeply engraved in his heart. Therefore, when Loongson was just starting out, all the well-known companies that could think of came to Hu Weiwu to discuss technology licensing cooperation. "I understand these behaviors as’surrender the gun and not kill ‘!" He saw that behind the technology licensing was to make Loongson give up the ability to innovate and develop, so he decisively refused.
Thirty years later, the young man in red became a white-haired gentleman, and Hu Weiwu launched another more thorough and difficult "entrepreneurship".
The global information industry is mainly built on Wintel (Microsoft-Intel Alliance) and AA (Android-ARM) two ecosystems based on Instruction Set Architecture and chip design. If you want to produce CPUs that match them, you must first obtain the Instruction Set Architecture "license".
"In order to achieve a fully independent innovation CPU, we must also achieve autonomy at the underlying technical level of the Instruction Set Architecture." In 2021, LoongArch officially released LoongArch, the LoongArch autonomous command system architecture of Loongson, achieving a major technological breakthrough in its ecological construction. This marks that LoongArch has moved from a follow-up development to a completely independent development in terms of independent information technology system and industrial ecological construction.
The Loongson 3A5000, which supports a 14-second boot time, is based on the LoongArch autonomous command system architecture and no longer requires foreign authorization.
One innovation breakthrough after another, tempering the Beijing Xinchuang industry chain: ZTE database, Guoke Tianxun avionics bus protocol chip, QINGTENG and other global benchmarking products were born, the domestic information technology system was initially formed, Beijing Economic Development Zone Tongming Lake National Xinchuang Park, has gathered more than 90% of the country’s information technology leading enterprises, forming a high-performance chip, operating system, database, machine end point, system integration, cyber security services and other industry chain Xinchuang industry ecosystem.
Beijing Economic Development Zone National Xinchuang Park Tongxin Software Technology Co., Ltd. "Ecological Adaptation Dispatch Center"
"Some products are like raising pigs, which can be slaughtered for meat in one year; some products are like raising cattle, which can be plowed and worked in three years; our products are like raising children, which can be raised for 20 years." Hu Weiwu compared technological research to "raising children", which vividly condensed the difficult process of information technology breakthrough, and also foreshadowed that the autonomy of the credit creation industry still has a long way to go.
The "Beijing code farmers" who have worked hard for many years still need to make greater innovation breakthroughs in order to benchmark the international first-class and create a solid "foundation" for China’s economic digital transformation and industrial chain upgrade.
