Huawei has published a beta version of the HarmonyOS 2.0 operating system for smartphones and tablets being developed as alternatives to Android and Fuchsia platforms. The assemblies are prepared for Huawei P40, P40 Pro, Mate30 and Mate30 Pro smartphones, as well as for the MatePad Pro tablet. The user interface is based on EMUI 11, which is also used in Huawei devices based on the Android platform. The first smartphones based on the new OS are scheduled to go on sale in October 2021.
Recall that the Harmony project has been in development since 2017 and is a microkernel operating system. The project’s developments are published under the BSD license as part of the OpenHarmony project, which is overseen by the non-profit organization China Open Atomic Open Source Foundation. Features of Harmony:
- The core of the system is verified at the level of formal logic / mathematics to minimize the risk of vulnerabilities. The verification was carried out using methods commonly used in the development of critical systems in areas such as aviation and astronautics, and allows you to meet 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 taken out into system services, most of which are executed in user space.
- As a task scheduler, a Deterministic Latency Engine, which analyzes the load in real time and uses methods to predict application behavior, is proposed as a task scheduler. Compared to other systems, the scheduler achieves a 25.7% reduction in latency and a 55.6% reduction in latency jitter.
- To provide communication between the microkernel and external kernel services such as filesystems, networking stack, drivers, and application launcher uses IPC, which the company claims is five times faster than IPC in Zircon and three times faster than IPC in QNX.
- Instead of the commonly used four-layer protocol stack to reduce overhead, Harmony employs a simplified single-layer model based on a distributed virtual bus to interface with hardware such as screens, cameras, sound cards, etc. li >
- The system does not provide root user access.