Huawei Hongmeng insists on originality

Huawei has finally unveiled half of its Hongmeng OS (its actual application is still unknown). This system, which is responsible for creating an all-scenario era, is called Harmony in English, implying that Huawei is willing to coexist peacefully with the world around it.

The "streamlined" kernel is more efficient

Before the release of Hongmeng, it was rumored that it would use a traditional macro kernel. However, Huawei Consumer Business CEO Richard Yu announced that this is the world's first microkernel-based full-scenario distributed OS.

To give a brief introduction, the concept of microkernel is relative to macrokernel. In addition to clock interrupts, process creation and destruction, process scheduling, and inter-process communication, the macrokernel also includes file systems, memory management, input and output, and device driver management. Microkernel does not worry about so many things, but only implements the most basic mechanisms of the operating system, including underlying address space management, thread management, and inter-process communication (IPC).

Whether it is Apple's iOS or Android, they are all based on Linux or Uinux, and the kernel is very large. The Android operating system has 100 million lines of code, and the kernel alone has more than 20 million lines of code, which is very complex. Usually, we only use 8% of the code in the kernel. Such a huge and redundant design is difficult to ensure smoothness.

The miniaturization of kernels or microkernels has become the future development direction of operating systems. Google's next-generation operating system Fuchsia is a microkernel. "However, Fuchsia is not a distributed design, and its performance is not good enough," Yu Chengdong emphasized.

When introducing the original intention of developing Hongmeng OS, Yu Chengdong said: "With the advent of the era of all-scenario intelligence, Huawei believes that it is necessary to further enhance the cross-platform capabilities of the operating system, including the ability to support all scenarios, across multiple devices and platforms, and the ability to cope with low latency and high security challenges. Therefore, the prototype of Hongmeng OS has gradually taken shape."

Only basic services are provided so that the microkernel can be adapted to various devices. To be precise, Hongmeng OS realizes the modular decoupling of the software system and the hardware platform, and can be deployed on different devices. No matter what the memory scale of the device is, Hongmeng OS can adapt to it.

Distributed is another label of Hongmeng OS. Hongmeng OS can use the distributed bus to realize cross-device calls of multi-terminal hardware capabilities.

Virtualize peripherals into shared resources, and a distributed soft bus can connect different terminals. An operating system allows the same user account to schedule hardware capabilities across devices.

The minimalist protocol is the essence of the distributed soft bus. The figure below shows the traditional seven-layer network communication standard model, including the physical layer, data link layer, network layer, transport layer, session layer, presentation layer, and application layer. The distributed operating system Hongmeng OS simplifies the four-layer communication protocol in the middle. After calculation, the distributed soft bus can also achieve low latency, a throughput of 1.2G/S, and high reliability, and can still guarantee user experience even when the packet loss reaches 25%.

The biggest advantage of distributed architecture is that it enables developers to focus on their own business logic and develop cross-terminal distributed applications as if they were developing for the same terminal. It also allows end consumers to enjoy the seamless experience brought by powerful cross-terminal business collaboration capabilities for various usage scenarios.

Safe "highway"

A major shortcoming of the existing Android system is that it is difficult to ensure fair scheduling when facing loads, and it is difficult to guarantee user experience. Huawei has made innovations in this regard, through real-time load analysis and prediction, matching applications, and ensuring accurate resource scheduling. This is the deterministic latency engine of Hongmeng OS, which can run various loads in different lanes according to their speeds to ensure a smooth user interaction experience. At the same time, Hongmeng OS also uses high-performance IPC technology, which increases the communication efficiency between processes by 5 times.

The two technologies have enabled Hongmeng OS to build an internal communication highway. In order to ensure the safety of road conditions, Huawei has also equipped it with multiple protection functions.

以前只用在航空等高安全领域的形式化方法被使用在鸿蒙系统中。形式化方法是利用数学方法，从源头验证系统正确，无漏洞的有效手段。传统验证方法如功能验证，模拟攻击等只能在选择的有限场景进行验证，而形式化方法可通过数据模型验证所有软件运行路径。鸿蒙OS首次将形式化方法用于终端TEE，显著提升安全等级。华为也是首家通过了形式化验证，来提显著地提升了TEE的内核安全的企业。

Another security barrier is the size of the microkernel. Since the code volume of the Hongmeng OS microkernel is only one thousandth of that of the Linux macrokernel, its attack probability is greatly reduced.

The third security barrier is that the microkernel is naturally rootless, and the outer core services are isolated from each other, which can further improve the system security performance. However, once the root permissions of the traditional Android system are illegally obtained, the entire system will be completely compromised.

The current microkernel of Hongmeng OS does not require root permissions. Yu Chengdong said that according to the evaluation of authoritative evaluation organizations, the evaluation results show that in theory, the security of the microkernel can be more than twice that of the macrokernel.

In fact, the HarmonyOS microkernel has been put into commercial use on Android phones, tablets and other devices. Many Huawei smart terminals after the Mate 20 have used the HarmonyOS microkernel, bringing unprecedented security improvements.

Rapidly build an ecological environment

Establishing an ecosystem is the key to the success or failure of an operating system.

With its multi-terminal development IDE, unified compilation of multiple languages, and distributed architecture Kit, Hongmeng OS provides automatic adaptation of screen layout controls and interactions, supports dragging of controls, and preview-oriented visual programming, allowing developers to efficiently build multi-terminal automatic running apps based on the same project.

Here we must mention the Ark Compiler, which is a powerful secret weapon that Huawei has spent ten years to build. It can replace the static compiler of the Android virtual machine mode, allowing developers to compile high-level languages ​​into machine code at one time in the development environment.

Today, all Android applications are Java DEX code and C/C++ library files (APK), which need to be recompiled into machine code by the mobile phone before execution. The Ark compiler can mix different languages, and can unify and optimize Java and C++. At the same time, the executable program formed does not need to be recompiled by the mobile phone. This process eliminates the shortcomings of the Android system so far and greatly improves the fluency of the application.

Huawei said that the framework of the Ark compiler will be open source in September this year. In 2020, Huawei will open source all the codes of the Ark compiler.

From the beginning of development, the ecological construction of the Hongmeng system has stood at a very high starting point. In order to quickly promote the ecological development of Hongmeng OS, Hongmeng OS will be open source to global developers, and promote the establishment of an open source foundation, build an open source community, and work with developers to promote the development of Hongmeng, and make suggestions on industry or technology development through discussion.

evolution

Huawei also announced the evolution roadmap of the Hongmeng kernel and OS, and will first use Hongmeng OS 1.0 in the smart screen products launched this year. In the next three years, in addition to improving related technologies, Hongmeng OS will gradually be applied to more smart devices such as wearables, smart screens, and car machines.

The application of Hongmeng system in mobile phones is what everyone is most concerned about. Yu Chengdong said, "Hongmeng can be used at any time, but for ecological reasons, we give priority to using Google's Android operating system. If the Android operating system is no longer available, we can always enable our Hongmeng."

Previous news indicated that mobile phones equipped with the Hongmeng system will be available in the fourth quarter of 2019. The phone is expected to be priced at around 2,000 yuan and will mainly target mid- and low-end mobile phone users.

If the United States continues to put pressure on Huawei, Hongmeng system may be installed on a large scale. According to the situation that one out of every three mobile phones in China is a Huawei phone, market research company Strategy Analytics (SA) predicts that Hongmeng's market share will exceed 5% within three years, which will squeeze the market share of Google's Android system.

SA has predicted that if the United States continues to put pressure on Huawei, Huawei will launch 19 million mobile phones equipped with Hongmeng system this year, accounting for about 0.3% of the total smartphone system. The market share of Hongmeng system will increase to 2.2% in 2020, grow to 4.3% in 2021, and grow rapidly to 8.7% in 2024, of which Chinese users will account for more than 90%.

The growth of Hongmeng system will squeeze the market of Android. SA predicts that Android's market share will drop slightly from 84.5% in 2019 to 82.9% in 2020, and continue to decline to 81.1% in 2021, and 79.6% in 2022, entering the 7-digit range. During this period, iOS's market share will remain at around 13%.