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
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.
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.
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
Another interesting tidbit from the paper:
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