Huawei has unveiled a self-developed operating system called the HarmonyOS NEXT. At the development event, the CEO described the OS as fully independent with a full-stack AI framework. The CEO has also claimed that the Harmony kernel is three times more efficient than Linux.
A lot of techbro lingo, but I’m glad that IT sovereignty is being pursued more by China. Mobile operating systems are notoriously difficult to get down correctly.
I’m skeptical. “Efficiency” could mean a lot of different things, even the the context of memory management. And it’s a weird metric to put forward since as far as I know, RAM is not really what’s holding us back at the moment.
I’m all for experimenting with new OS designs, but I think even Google just gave up their best try at being better than Linux, so I guess it’s not impossible that Huawei has done it, but I think not likely.
In terms of computation speed, RAM actually is the thing holding us back. It used to take a few clock cycles to read a value from memory. Now it takes 100. CPU got a lot more quicker than RAM did.
But it is the easiest way to “outperform the Linux kernel”. You’ll always have to trade memory for features, since they don’t have the developer pool to support features well, they’ll be able to optimize memory usage no problemo. Now you get to load it onto phones under the pretense that it’s “more efficient”, then voila, you have practically infinite embedded tracker potential.
WhatsApp also says it cares about your privacy
Oh. For some reason I thought it was based on Linux, maybe even Android.
it is a modified Android. And yes it uses linux kernel same as android
It does not. The Linux kernel is not a multikernel OS and HarmonyOS is. Now Harmony does indeed implement the ability to bring in a modified ASOP to provide Android app compatibility, but the actual OS that supervises that isn’t Linux based, though it does provide a UNIX environment.
The reason HarmonyOS works well with the devices is because the OS and the devices are being built by the same person. It’s likely that HarmonyOS would run like ass or not at all on anything not made by Huawei, it’s also why the OS is mostly closed source with some open parts.
But just because they both present a UNIX environment, does not mean HarmonyOS is or derived from Linux. They are indeed two different OSes with fundamentally different approaches to managing the underlying system.
So it somehow claims to outpace the technology that underpins it? This is ridiculous at best.
It is a multikernel OS. It can use the Linux kernel (usually on more powerful phones), or switch to a lighter kernel Huawei built (on weaker phones / IoT stuff). I’m guessing they are saying here that the lighter kernel is much more efficient, at least for the tasks it is optimised for.
“Privacy-focused” OS from a Chinese company? Really? The same company that’s been accused of stealing secrets from its android phone users and automatically blocks content unfavorable to the Chinese government no matter what country you’re in???
I don’t believe you.
X for doubt
I believe it. Linux is not a good measure of efficiency (see kernel bypass tcp stacks, af_xdp, dpdk, spdk, etc). You can almost always make something more efficient/faster than Linux for a given task. The problem is doing that while having support for almost all hardware/configurations/uses cases under the sun.
That’s seriously overlooking decades of Linux being optimized for embedded/mobile/cloud/desktop… computing and billions having been invested in engineering efforts by companies like Google, AMD, Nvidia, MediaTek, Intel, Facebook, Microsoft, Red Hat, … for which every bit squeezed out of the hardware means millions in operating costs saved. Sure there are niches where Linux isn’t the best fit for the job, but with such widespread usage and support, you are almost guaranteed to be reaching peak performance for whatever device it’s running on, with the category of devices HarmonyOS is targeting being amongst the one having the most eyeballs.
I don’t believe anything, I want numbers and hard evidence, and then you’ll see me cheering.
