At the Huawei Developers Conference, held today in Songshan Lake, Dongguan, Huawei’s consumer business officially launched its new microkernel-based distributed operating system for all scenarios – Hongmeng OS.
Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei’s consumer business, said in the main speech that in the traditional model of the past, the emergence of each new form of end point will be accompanied by the birth of new operating systems. "Whether it is in the PC era, the mobile Internet era, or the Internet of Things era that 5G is about to give birth to, different eras will give birth to different operating systems." Therefore, in the face of the upcoming era of full-scene intelligence, "there should also be corresponding operating systems." Yu Chengdong said bluntly: "With the advent of the era of full-scene wisdom, Huawei believes that it is necessary to further enhance the cross-platform capability of the operating system, including the ability to support full-scene, across multiple devices and platforms, and the ability to deal with low-latency and high-security challenges. Therefore, the embryonic form of Hongmeng OS has gradually formed. It can be said that the starting point of Hongmeng OS is different from Android and iOS. It is a brand-new microkernel-based distributed operating system for all scenes, which can meet the requirements of smooth experience of all scenes, architecture-level trusted security, seamless collaboration across end points, and multi-end point deployment at one time. Hongmeng should be born in the future."
According to him, as early as ten years ago, Huawei began to lay out Hongmeng OS, and now with the continuous improvement of Huawei’s full-scene smart life strategy, Hongmeng OS will be the product of Huawei to meet the arrival of the full-scene experience era, play its lightweight, small and powerful advantages, take the lead in applying smart watches, smart screens, in-vehicle equipment, smart speakers and other intelligent end points, and strive to build a cross-end point integration sharing ecosystem, reshape a safe and reliable operating environment, and create a new experience for consumers.
Four highlights of Hongmeng OS
According to Yu Chengdong, the original intention of Hongmeng OS is to meet the high-standard connection requirements of full-scene intelligent experience, and Huawei has proposed a system solution with four major characteristics for this purpose.
1. Distributed architecture for the first time for end point OS, enabling seamless collaborative experience across end points
Hongmeng OS "distributed OS architecture" and "distributed soft bus technology" through the public communication platform, distributed data management, distributed scheduling capabilities and virtual peripherals four capabilities, the corresponding distributed application of the underlying technology implementation difficulty of application developers shield, so that developers can focus on their own business logic, like the development of the same end point to develop cross-end point distributed applications, but also enable end consumers to enjoy a strong cross-end point business collaboration capabilities for the use of scenarios to bring a seamless experience.
2. Determine the natural fluency of the delay engine and high-performance IPC technology implementation system
Hongmeng OS solves the problem of insufficient performance of existing systems by using two technologies: determined delay engine and high-performance IPC. Determined delay engine can allocate task execution priority and time limit in the system before task execution. High-priority task resources will be prioritized to ensure scheduling, and application response delay will be reduced by 25.7%. The small structure of Hongmeng microkernel greatly improves the performance of IPC (inter-process communication), and the process communication efficiency is 5 times higher than that of existing systems.
3. Reshape end point device trusted security based on microkernel architecture
Hongmeng OS adopts a new microkernel design, which has stronger security features and low latency. The basic idea of microkernel design is to simplify the kernel function, implement as many system services as possible in user mode outside the kernel, and add mutual security protection. Microkernels only provide the most basic services, such as multi-process scheduling and multi-process communication.
Hongmeng OS applies microkernel technology to Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to reinvent trusted security through formal methods. Formal methods are effective means to use mathematical methods to verify that the system is correct and free of vulnerabilities from the source. Traditional verification methods such as function verification and simulated attacks can only be verified in selected limited scenarios, while formal methods can verify all software running paths through data models. Hongmeng OS applies formal methods to end point TEE for the first time, which significantly improves the security level. At the same time, because the code volume of Hongmeng microOS kernel is only one thousandth of that of Linux macro kernel, its probability of being attacked is also greatly reduced.
4. Support one development, multi-terminal deployment through unified IDE to achieve cross-end point ecological sharing
Hongmeng OS relies on multi-end point development IDE, multi-language unified compilation, distributed architecture Kit provides screen layout controls and automatic adaptation of interaction, supports control drag and drop, and visual programming for preview, so that developers can efficiently build multi-end automatic running apps based on the same project, realize true one-time development, multi-terminal deployment, and realize a shared ecosystem between devices. Huawei Ark Compiler is the first static compiler to replace the Android virtual machine mode, allowing developers to compile high-level languages into machine code at one time in the development environment. In addition, Ark Compiler will support multi-language unified compilation in the future, which can greatly improve development efficiency.
The past and present life of "Hongmeng" OS
In 2017, Hongmeng Kernel 1.0 completed the technical verification.
In 2018, Hongmeng kernel 2.0 was applied to end point TEE
In 2019, Hongmeng OS 1.0 was completed, based on the open-source framework, in which Huawei self-developed in key modules, using distributed architecture and ARK compiler. Determine the delay engine, launch TEE microkernel formal verification, multi-end point development IDE (Beta), and currently Hongmeng system will be applied to smart screens.
In 2020, Hongmeng OS 2.0 is about to appear, the kernel and application framework are self-developed, the general micro-kernel architecture, high-performance graphics stack are launched, multi-language unified compilation, multi-end point development IDE, meet the car standard, and applied to innovative domestic PC, watch/bracelet, car machine and other products.
It is expected that by 2021, Hongmeng OS 3.0 will complete soft and hard collaborative optimization, vertical acceleration file system, software and hardware collaborative high-performance IPC, and be applied to audio headphones. After 2022, Hongmeng system will be applied to VR glasses and other devices.
Explanation of terms
What is a microsystem?
The micro kernel is a stripped-down version of the kernel that provides the core functions of the operating system. It is designed to increase portability in a small memory space and provides a modular design to allow users to install different interfaces, such as DOS, Workplace OS, Workplace UNIX, etc. New operating systems such as IBM, Microsoft, the Open Software Foundation (OSF), and the UNIX Systems Laboratory (USL) have all adopted the advantages of this research.
[Nanfang Network All Media Reporters] Xu Jun, Gao Xiaoping, Huang Shaohong, Sun Junjie
[Trainee reporters] Huang Haobo, Zhang Shiting
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