Deep Sound Original · The author | Chen Wenqi
In the Internet world, there are two very different software development models, one is a closed, vertical, centralized closed source development model, and the other is a parallel, peer-to-peer, dynamic open source development model. To borrow the metaphor of Eric Raymond, the "standard-bearer" of the open source movement, the former is a closed cathedral and the latter is an open bazaar.
In the "bazaar", open-source programs are exposed to millions of programmers, bugs have nowhere to hide, debugging and contributions are also a collection of wisdom and strengths. The seemingly free, loose organizational form has a stronger vitality, giving birth to Linux, a successful world-class operating system.
If you express the advantages of open source projects in one sentence - everyone collects firewood and the flame is high.
The magic of open source is also gradually showing in OpenHarmony, especially at a time when the wave of digitalization is sweeping the industry.
Two years ago, the OpenHarmony open source project was established with the basic capabilities of Huawei's HarmonyOS (Hongmeng Operating System) as the prototype; two years later, OpenHarmony, which is open, free and emphasizes social collaboration, has become a powerful booster for accelerating the construction of digital bases for various industries and intelligent terminals.
The soil for the growth of Huawei's Hongmeng operating system is OpenHarmony. This soil is nourished and cultivated by Huawei and many contributors and developers, and everyone builds their own crops on the soil. And on top of this soil, plants are interconnected with each other, eventually forming a large, organic ecosystem.
Two-year-old OpenHarmony continues to evolve and the forest has become lush.
grow
On March 30, OpenHarmony iteratively updated to OpenHarmony 3.1 Release, which is its fourth iteration in two years, and the key features in many fields have been optimized, and the OpenHarmony 3.1 Release version has the basic ability to support the development of complex standard system devices and applications with screens.
Before analyzing OpenHarmony's fast-paced iterations, we need to look at its initials and clarify the concepts.
In 2020 and 2021, Huawei donated the basic capabilities of the Hongmeng operating system to the Open Atomic Open Source Foundation twice, and for a time there was a misunderstanding such as "Hongmeng handed over to the state".
In fact, the Foundation is a non-profit independent legal entity registered with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and its main role is to integrate other participants, conduct open source community governance of the project, and provide trademark protection, development and operations, etc.
To this end, the Foundation has established a project group working committee together with 7 initial co-construction units, including Huawei, PATEO, JD.com, and the Institute of Software of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
OpenHarmony is more similar to AOSP (Andriod Open Source Project). Any organization or individual can download and use Android's source code and develop operating systems based on their own product features, such as Xiaomi's MIUI and OPPO's ColorOS.
The success of an open source project not only requires strong technical strength and foresight, but also the participation and contribution of vendors and developers at all levels.
First, on a technical level, OpenHarmony is a distributed operating system. It differs from ordinary network operating systems in that it manages system resources in a global manner and arbitrarily schedules network resources for users. When users submit jobs, distributed operating systems are able to select the most appropriate processor in the system on demand, without users even realizing the existence of multiple processors.
It follows a hierarchical design as a whole, from the bottom up to the kernel layer, the system service layer, the framework layer, and the application layer.
OpenHarmony technical architecture diagram
From the 2020 OpenHarmony 1.0 LTS release, OpenHarmony 2.0 Canary, to the recent OpenHarmony 3.1 Release, the technical capabilities of the project itself have undergone many iterations, and the features and support capabilities at all levels have been enhanced, from the kernel-level Linux kernel, the LiteOS kernel, to the system services distributed hardware, distributed data, distributed security capabilities, and then to the framework-layer application framework. Graphics framework, UX design.
In summary, OpenHarmony's technical advantages mainly have three points: unified OS, elastic deployment, hardware mutual assistance, resource sharing, one-time development, multi-terminal deployment.
To understand its significance simply, that is, based on this, OpenHarmony can achieve a set of system capabilities and adapt to a variety of terminal forms. For application developers, the unified software architecture opens up a variety of terminals, so that the development and implementation of the application has nothing to do with the morphological differences of different terminal devices, which greatly reduces the difficulty and cost of development.
According to Yu Chengdong, "In the era of the Internet of Everything, no one will be an island." Everyone and every device is conceived to be part of the Connected World, and this advantage of OpenHarmony complements the internet of everything era.
At the same time, in an open, collaborative, and innovative community environment, the OpenHarmony ecosystem is taking shape, and the development resources and tools are constantly enriched, forming a positive cycle.
A complete operating system ecosystem is all-encompassing: chips, modules, and development versions provide hardware support; open source operating system community versions provide basic system capabilities; ISVs (Independent software vendors), OEMs develop more powerful industry distributions, software and hardware solutions, or smart terminals based on community versions, chips, and development boards; and application developers develop supporting applications Ultimately for corporate customers and individual consumers to use, and create value.
From the perspective of development resources, some intuitive data can support the expansion of OpenHarmony.
Development resources include adapter chips, development versions, tripartite libraries, development documents, tutorials, and compatibility reviews. OpenHarmony currently has 11 mainstream chips support, the number will reach 35 at the end of the year; the open source community has launched 90+ JS three-party libraries to meet the basic needs of developer animation, network, tools, images and other aspects of ability, by the end of the year will increase to 300+, covering 24 types of typical industry application areas; 301 development examples, developers can quickly get started; OpenHarmony launched a compatibility evaluation platform to provide evaluation services for ecological partners. At present, 44 products have passed the evaluation.
As a two-year-old open source project, OpenHarmony is undoubtedly a newborn calf, but its rapid growth rate is indispensable to its technological advantages and ecological strength.
nourish
Who needs OpenHarmony? Why?
The advent of the era of interconnection of all things and the digitalization of the whole industry is the established general direction. In fact, the perception of the consumer side has been very strong, from smart phones to speakers, smart screens, TVs, wearable devices interconnected. However, we are still only at the dawn of dawn, not only in the field of consumer electronics, the Internet of Everything will empower all walks of life, medical, financial, energy, industrial, transportation, education and so on.
It's going to be a long evolutionary process. From the perspective of equipment, the system isolation of various intelligent terminal systems and various brand equipment has barriers; from the perspective of the industry dimension, the degree of digitization of various industries is different, and the industry know-how gap is large, which also brings difficulties to data circulation and system integration.
Because of this, a unified operating system base is essential, and OpenHarmony carries a lot of expectations.
OpenHarmony is a soil that is nourishing all walks of life. Software distributions and business solutions have accelerated, and commercial applications have sprung up.
In terms of smartphones, Huawei HarmonyOS 2 is a case in point. Last year, Huawei officially released a new intelligent terminal operating system HarmonyOS 2 for the era of the Internet of Everything, and as of now, the number of Huawei devices equipped with HarmonyOS has exceeded 220 million, including mobile phones, TVs, speakers, watches, etc.
In terms of smart homes, home appliance giant Midea is one of OpenHarmony's partners. In October last year, Midea released Midea's IoT operating system 1.0, which is the first distributed IoT operating system in the smart home industry based on OpenHarmony 2.0. The system can realize the interconnection between multiple brands and products, and provide new solutions for independent collaboration between devices, cloud integration, AI interaction empowerment and other issues. On the consumer side, this is a plug-and-play, efficient platform, for developers, the development environment is more convenient, the application ecosystem is more powerful.
OpenHarmony is also expanding its capabilities into other product areas. On November 9, 2021, Comtech Technologies, a technology service platform of The Core City Group serving the chip industry, launched the first intelligent BMS battery management system based on OpenHarmony.
Intelligent BMS battery management system is based on domestic chips, combined with OpenHarmony solutions, mainly used in intelligent power battery products, will be widely used in new energy vehicles, electric bicycles and industrial power systems. The intelligent BMS battery management system will greatly improve the performance and safety of the power battery, and at the same time achieve multiple communication transmission functions and real-time data management in the cloud, further realizing the low power consumption and intelligent application of the power battery.
In the rapidly changing financial field, the intelligent Internet of Things operating system service provider Shen Kaihong released a KaihongOS distribution for the financial industry in March, with OpenHarmony as the technical base, supporting a variety of financial payment devices such as smart POS, cloud speakers, and scan code terminals. It is understood that the release version has four major technical advantages of distributed architecture, kernel-level security, high-performance IPC and determining latency, which can provide a unified device language for the intelligence, interconnection and collaboration of multiple financial terminals, and realize the application of a system in all scenarios.
OpenHarmony Technology Day on April 25
At present, more than 80 software and hardware products are passing the OpenHarmony compatibility evaluation, including more than 30 development boards/modules, 8 software distributions, and 50+ commercial equipment. Technology does not land, just empty talk. We see more and more developers and enterprises entering OpenHarmony's "circle of friends", constantly expanding and deepening its technical power, in social collaboration, not only bringing more value to consumers, but also boosting the digital transformation of the entire industry.
Ecology is the moat of open source systems. OpenHarmony needs more partners, from upstream hardware support, to downstream applications, until the so-called "critical scale" is broken, users join because of the richness of the application, and developers are developed because of the order of magnitude of users, attracting each other, and then forming a flywheel effect, AOSP is an appropriate case.
After four iterations in two years and more than a hundred hardware and software applications, the speed of OpenHarmony is already obvious. The ecological battle for OpenHarmony has begun, and the opponent may not be other open source operating systems, but time.