Release of openEuler 20.03 Linux distribution developed by Huawei

Huawei presented Linux distribution open Euler 20.03, which was the first release to be supported as part of a Long Cycle of Support (LTS). Package updates for openEuler 20.03 will be released until March 31, 2024. Repositories and installation iso-images (x86_64 и aarch64) available for free download from providing package source code. Distribution-Specific Component Sources placed in the Gitee service.

openEuler is based on the developments of a commercial distribution EulerOS, which is a fork of the CentOS package base and is optimized for use on servers with ARM64 processors. The protection methods used in the EulerOS distribution are certified by the Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China, and are also recognized as compliant with the requirements of CC EAL4+ (Germany), NIST CAVP (USA) and CC EAL2+ (USA). EulerOS is one of five operating systems (EulerOS, macOS, Solaris, HP-UX and IBM AIX) and the only Linux distribution certified by the Opengroup committee UNIX 03.

The differences between openEuler and CentOS are quite significant and are not limited to rebranding. For example, in openEuler supplied modified Linux kernel 4.19, systemd 243, bash 5.0 and
desktop based on GNOME 3.30. Many ARM64-specific optimizations have been made, some of which have already been transferred to the main Linux kernel codebases, GCC, OpenJDK and Docker.

Among the declared benefits of openEuler:

• Focus on achieving maximum performance on multi-core systems and high parallelism of query processing. Optimization of the file cache management mechanism made it possible to get rid of unnecessary locks and increase the number of parallel requests processed in Nginx by 15%.
• Integrated library Kae, allowing the use of hardware accelerators Hisilicon Kunpeng to speed up the performance of various algorithms (cryptographic operations, regular expressions, compression etc.) from 10% to 100%.
• Simplified isolated container management toolkit iSulad, network configurator clibcni and runtime lcr (Lightweight Container Runtime, OCI compliant, but unlike runc, written in C and uses gRPC). When using iSulad lightweight containers, containers start up faster by up to 35% and memory consumption is reduced by up to 68%.
• An optimized build of OpenJDK showing a 20% increase in performance due to an upgraded memory management system and applying advanced compilation optimizations.
• Automatic settings optimization system A-Tune, which uses machine learning methods to tune system operation parameters. According to Huawei tests, automatic optimization of settings depending on the use case of the system shows an increase in efficiency of up to 30%.
• Support for various hardware architectures such as Kunpeng and x86 processors (more supported architectures are expected in the future).

Huawei also announced the emergence of four commercial editions of openEuler - Kylin Server OS, iSoft Server OS, deepinEuler and EulixOS Server, prepared by third-party manufacturers Kylinsoft, iSoft, Uniontech and ISCAS (Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences), which are connected to the work of the community, developing openEuler. Huawei initially promotes openEuler as an open, collaborative project developed with the participation of the community. At present, the technical committee, the security committee and the public secretariat that oversee openEuler have already begun to work.

The community plans to create certification, training and technical support services. LTS-releases are planned to be formed every two years, and versions that develop functionality - once every six months. The project has also made a commitment to push changes to Upstream as a priority and return all development to the community in the form of open source projects.

Source: opennet.ru