Huawei devices now run HarmonyOS. "Since its introduction, the software has been receiving backlash from the media, especially from non-Chinese. HarmonyOS is criticized as an Android clone. However, Huawei has been denying this since the beginning. Recently, the man behind the software reaffirmed that HarmonyOS is different."

"Mr. Wang Chenglu goes by 'Father of HarmonyOS' in China."

"Unlike Android and iOS, HarmonyOS is designed for multiple devices. It is a unified OS that supports flexible deployment."

"The software uses AOSP (Android Open Source Project) components, which comprise code from the open-source community."

I first heard of HarmonyOS (called Hongmeng in Chineseand not to be confused with SerenityOS) in 2019, following news about the US Department of Commerce putting restrictions on Huawei (due to its doing business with Iran in violation of sanctions), and figured Huawei started development on it in response to US government restrictions and rhetoric, but apparently development on HarmonyOS actually began in 2012.

HarmonyOS is said to be a multikernel operating system, which means it treats a multi-core machine as a network of independent cores, as if it were a distributed system. Which seems whacky to me, and likely to make your system unnecessarily complicated. But maybe they thought of some way I don't know about to extend that to a multi-computer distributed system more easily than usual. Usually making a distributed system is hard. But maybe having a inter-process message-passing system built directly into the OS, using that for communication on one machine, and extending that system to communicating off the machine, makes it easier for Huawei to achieve their goal of making it easy for "Internet of Things" devices to communicate with Android devices that use the AOSP project as noted, and regular computers, network components that Huawei makes like network routers, and other devices. My experience is that local communications and remote communications should be treated differently, because when engaging in remote communications, there's encoding and error conditions that don't apply in the local case.

#solidstatelife #computerscience #operatingsystems #huawei

https://www.gizmochina.com/2023/01/03/harmonyos-neither-android-nor-ios/