At the HDC 2020 conference, the company about expanding plans for the Harmony operating system, announced last year. In addition to the initially announced portable devices and Internet of Things (IoT) products such as displays, wearables, smart speakers and car info systems, the OS under development will also be applied to smartphones.
Testing of the Harmony mobile app development SDK will begin at the end of 2020, with the first smartphones based on the new OS scheduled to be released in October 2021. It is noted that the new OS is already ready for IoT devices with RAM from 128KB to 128MB, in April 2021, the promotion of the option for devices with memory from 128MB to 4GB will begin, and in October for devices with more than 4GB of RAM.
Recall that the Harmony project has been in development since 2017 and is a microkernel operating system that can be considered as a competitor to the OS from Google. The platform will be published in source code as a completely open source project with independent management (Huawei already open for IoT devices). The platform code will be donated to the non-profit organization China Open Atomic Open Source Foundation. Huawei believes that Android is not as good for mobile devices due to excessive code, an outdated process scheduler, and platform fragmentation issues.
Harmony Features:
- The core of the system has been verified at the level of formal logic/mathematics to minimize the risk of vulnerabilities. The verification was carried out using methods that are commonly used in the development of mission-critical systems in areas such as aviation and aerospace, and can achieve compliance with the security level of EAL 5+.
- The microkernel is isolated from external devices. The system is separated from the hardware and allows developers to create applications that can be used on various categories of devices without creating separate packages.
- The microkernel implements only the scheduler and IPC, and everything else is rendered into system services, most of which run in user space.
- As a task scheduler, a deterministic resource allocation engine (Deterministic Latency Engine), which analyzes the load in real time and uses methods for predicting application behavior, is proposed to minimize delays. Compared to other systems, the scheduler achieves a 25.7% reduction in delays and a 55.6% reduction in delay jitter.
- Communication between the microkernel and external kernel services such as the filesystem, network stack, drivers, and application launcher uses IPC, which the company claims is five times faster than Zircon's IPC and three times faster than Zircon's IPC. QNX.
- Instead of the usual four-layer protocol stack, to reduce overhead, Harmony uses a simplified one-layer model based on a distributed virtual bus that provides interaction with equipment such as screens, cameras, sound cards, etc.
- The system does not provide user access at the root level.
- The application is built using Arc's own compiler, which supports code in C, C++, Java, JavaScript, and Kotlin.
- To create applications for various classes of devices, such as TVs, smartphones, smart watches, automotive information systems, etc., our own universal framework for developing interfaces and an SDK with an integrated development environment will be provided. The toolkit will automatically adapt applications for different screens, controls and user interaction methods. It also mentions providing tools to adapt existing Android apps for Harmony with minimal changes.
Source: opennet.ru