1 second, 2 seconds, 3 seconds... Several "code farmers" of Beijing information and innovation enterprises sat around a laptop, holding their breath, paying full attention, and their hearts seemed to beat at the same frequency with the second hand.
At the 14th second, the computer desktop "lit up" smoothly, and the laboratory was suddenly jubilant.
From fighting for each other to clenching fingers into a fist, UnionTech unites upstream and downstream enterprises in the industry to jointly promote the research and development of domestic operating systems.
In the rapid iteration of technology, the boot time of domestic operating systems has been shortened step by step, and finally a 14-second leap will be achieved in 2022.
In March 2022, the Tongfang notebook computer equipped with Loongson 3A5000 4-core processor, UnionTech UOS operating system, and Kunlun BIOS firmware achieved a leap breakthrough in boot time of 14 seconds, representing that the computer of "China Core" and "Chinese Soul" is moving from "usable" to "easy to use", expanding its Chinese place in the information technology industry occupied by Intel and Microsoft for many years.
In every line of code that leaps to "14 seconds", there is hidden the creativity and ambition of generations of "Beijing code farmers". Representing Beijing's "soft power", some of them are white-haired gentlemen who have been fighting for decades, and some are still young people who have just entered the industry, and the difficulties in the chain of information technology application innovation are making key breakthroughs in their side by side.
Loongson CPU out of the "darkest hour"
Boot speed is the first impression that computer performance leaves on the user. Ten years ago, it took 10 minutes or more to turn on a computer equipped with domestic hardware and software.
The CPU (central processing unit) is the heart of the computer, and if you want to speed up the computer, you must pass this level first. Does Chinese have its own CPU?
Yes. In the early morning of August 10, 2002, the computer installed with the "Loongson No. 1" CPU was successfully started, ending the history of Chinese manufacturing computers entirely on imported CPUs. In 2010, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing jointly funded the establishment of Loongson Zhongke Company, hoping to accelerate the industrialization of R&D results.
However, just over two years later, Loongson Zhongke fell into the "darkest moment".
The Loongson team, which has a strong academic taste, has been focusing on improving CPU performance, and has not come up with a general-purpose CPU that meets the mainstream needs of the market. The high investment in research and development made the company's funds tight, and even failed to open salaries for a while, resulting in the loss of talent.
"This crisis has forced us to recognize reality." Founder Hu Weiwu realized that the Loongson R&D personnel who "went to the sea" to start a business gave up the establishment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, but forgot to pay attention to the real needs of the market. In other words, although the organization has been transformed, the concept has not kept pace.
Hu Weiwu, chief engineer of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and chief designer of Loongson
At that time, the mainstream CPU in the market was a multi-core design, Intel focused on dual-core and quad-core, and Loongson made eight cores in order to be superior. Hu Weiwu said frankly that the premise of "many people and great strength" is that everyone must be strong, and although Loongson is eight cores, the performance of each core is not as good as that of people. Loongson's CPU was not accepted by the market at the time for a simple reason - it was not easy to use.
After several years of detours, Loongson finally put down its "body" and set its sights on CPU in the field of industrial control, and then successfully applied it in the field of informatization. In continuous trial and error, Loongson achieved breakeven for the first time in 2015 with revenue exceeding 100 million yuan.
From 2015 to 2020, Loongson's performance increased by 10 times, which made it possible to support 14 seconds of boot. The Tongfang computer, which has a shortened boot time to 14 seconds, is equipped with the CPU of the Loongson 3A5000 series, and its performance has approached the mainstream level of open market CPUs.
Domestic operating systems are beginning to grow
For the majority of computer users, the classic icons of the Windows operating system are deeply remembered. The CPU is the heart of the computer, and the operating system is the soul. If Loongson is benchmarking against Intel, then who can benchmark against Microsoft?
In 2011, when Hu Weiwu was fighting for a higher level of CPU, Liu Wenhuan, general manager of UnionTech Software, decided to start a business from scratch and build a domestic operating system.
"If conquering chip technology is compared to climbing the Himalayas, the solution to the domestic operating system is to explore the Mariana Trench." Prior to that, he worked in an information security company for more than a decade, and he increasingly felt that if the operating system bottleneck could not be solved, information security could only be on paper.
During the same period, a number of software companies with similar ideals were born in China. But ideal plump, realistic skinny, the first wave of early adopters found that computers with domestic operating systems are not only slow, but also unable to chat, work, and play games normally like Windows. Although there are constantly new domestic systems online, in the face of the gap in technology and the cruel choice of the market, these software companies have fallen one after another.
Overcoming difficulties cannot be solved by oneself. To solve the pain points of users such as slow boot and short battery life, it is necessary to jointly tackle key problems in CPU, operating system and other industries.
In 2019, UnionTech Software Technology Co., Ltd., jointly established by a number of domestic operating system manufacturers, was established, headquartered in Beijing Economic and Development Zone Information Innovation Park, and set up technical support institutions, R&D centers and general software and hardware adaptation centers in Wuhan, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other places.
From fighting for each other to clenching fingers into a fist, UnionTech unites upstream and downstream enterprises in the industry to jointly promote the research and development of domestic operating systems. In the rapid iteration of technology, the boot time of domestic operating systems has been shortened step by step, and finally a 14-second leap will be achieved in 2022.
"The gap between domestic operating systems and products from top international manufacturers has narrowed from 10 years or more to 3 to 5 years." Liu Wenhuan said.
Today, UnionTech operating system has been implemented in many key industries such as banks and telecom operators, and the latest home version was also unveiled at the beginning of this year. However, the nascent domestic operating system still faces the risk of "supply interruption" from the upstream open source community, which in turn affects the sustainable development of the industry.
"The reason is that the root community based on the Linux open source system in China is abroad." Liu Wenhuan said that the root community can help operating system vendors get rid of the constraints of the upstream open source community and get better protection at the level of information security. Figuratively speaking, even the "supply chain" must also be secure.
Two months after the realization of 14 seconds of boot, based on the three major independent open source communities in the world, UnionTech released China's first desktop operating system root community "deepin community", starting from the "root", mastering the development right of open source operating system and the leading right of upstream community, attracting global enthusiasts to contribute code and creativity to domestic operating systems.
"Raise" an independent industrial chain
In 2014, the Windows XP system, which was sought after by the Chinese people, stopped service, and for a time, a large number of enterprises and individual users were confused. Although most functions can still be used normally after the server is stopped, it cannot obtain Microsoft vulnerability patches and system upgrade support, and is vulnerable to viruses and hacker attacks.
Six years later, Windows 10 was discontinued and the exact same situation was staged. This has further stimulated Beijing's motivation to build an independent information and innovation industry system.
Flipping back to 30 years ago, Hu Weiwu, who was still a doctoral student at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, needed to use a high-performance computer that had just been imported from abroad because of his experiments, but the password of this computer was in the hands of foreigners, and the use needed to be monitored in a glass house.
Hu Weiwu, chief engineer of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and chief designer of Loongson, was interviewed by CCTV
This image is deep in his heart. Therefore, when Loongson was just starting out, all well-known companies that could think of came to Hu Weiwu to talk about technical licensing cooperation. "I understand these actions as 'shoot but don't kill'!" He saw that behind the technology authorization, Loongson gave up the ability to innovate and develop, so he decisively refused.
30 years later, the boy in red became Mr. White-haired, and Hu Weiwu started another more thorough and difficult "entrepreneurship".
The global information industry is mainly built on the two major ecosystems based on instruction set and chip design of Wintel (Microsoft-Intel Alliance) and AA (Android-ARM), and if you want to produce a CPU that matches it, you must first obtain the instruction set "authorization".
"If you want to be a completely independent innovation CPU, you must also achieve autonomy at the underlying technical level of the instruction set." In 2021, Loongson Zhongke officially released LoongArch, the independent command system architecture of Loongson, to achieve a major technological breakthrough in its ecological construction, which marked that Loongson Zhongke has moved from follow-up development to completely independent development in terms of independent information technology system and industrial ecological construction.
Loongson 3A5000, which supports a boot time of 14 seconds, adopts the LoongArch autonomous command system architecture and no longer requires foreign authorization.
One after another, innovative breakthroughs have tempered the Beijing information and innovation industry chain: ZTE database, Guoke Tianxun avionics bus protocol chip, Qingteng cloud security and a number of global benchmark products were born, the domestic information technology system has initially taken shape, and the National Information and Innovation Park on the shore of Tongming Lake in Beijing Economic Development Zone has gathered more than 90% of the country's leading information technology enterprises, forming an information and innovation industry ecology covering the whole industry chain such as high-performance chips, operating systems, databases, machine terminals, system integration, and network security services.
Beijing Economic Development Zone National Information Innovation Park UnionTech Software Technology Co., Ltd. "Ecological Adaptation Dispatching Center"
"Some products are like pigs, which can be slaughtered for meat in a year; Some products, like cattle, can plow the field in three years; Our products are like raising children, which take 20 years to become successful. Hu Weiwu compared technological research to "raising children", vividly condensing the difficult process of information technology breakthroughs, and also indicating that the autonomy of the information and innovation industry still has a long way to go.
The "Beijing code farmers" who have been fighting for many years still need to make greater innovation and breakthroughs in order to benchmark against the world-class and create a solid "foundation" for the digital transformation of China's economy and the upgrading of the industrial chain.