openEuler donated, open source flourish started

China's operating system has ushered in the best opportunity for development in the open source era.

If someone talked about China's domestically produced operating system three years ago, it might be really confusing. Faced with the crushing market advantages of the three major systems of Windows, Android, and iOS, whether it is an end user or an enterprise-level user, I am afraid that it is difficult to believe that the domestic system can make too many achievements. In addition, at the beginning of the century, a large number of domestic operating systems came with a halo, but left the market sadly. There is no ecology, no market, no technology accumulation, facing the competition of giants, I am afraid it is difficult to have other results.

But now, with the advent of the open source era, more and more developers are beginning to join it. Especially in 2019, the official release of HarmonyOS at the Huawei Developer Conference, and openEuler soon afterwards, made more people realize that the domestic operating system is so different in the open source era.

November 9, 2021, is also a day worth remembering. At the Operating System Industry Summit 2021 held this year, Huawei joined hands with all partners in the community to formally donate the Euler open source operating system to the Open Atom Open Source Foundation. Similar to the scene last year, OpenHarmony embraces open source in this way. The difference is that, as an open source operating system for digital infrastructure, Euler can be deployed in various forms of equipment such as servers, cloud computing, edge computing, and embedded, and its application scenarios cover IT (Information Technology) and CT (Communication Technology). And OT (Operational Technology), realize a unified operating system to support multiple devices, and the application can be developed at one time to cover all scenarios.

Fully embrace open source, openEuler's determination

On December 25 last year, the landing of openEuler Summit 2020 allowed us to see the infinite potential of technological innovation and open source ecology. The conference focused on software and hardware collaboration, cloud edge end, and diverse computing power scenarios. It brought together developers, users, community contributors, and software enthusiasts to continuously drive endless innovation and expansion to shine in the digital age.

And this year, the development of the times and technology has not stopped. At the industry level, facing digital infrastructure and digital full scenarios, the problem of operating system fragmentation still exists, ecological fragmentation, repeated application development, and difficulty in effective coordination coexist; at the policy level, the "14th Five-Year" Information Industry Development Plan is further It is required to accelerate the performance optimization and function improvement of domestic operating systems, and promote the adaptation and integration of databases, middleware, application software, browsers, and domain name service software. At the same time, it is not difficult to find that the open source model has become the mainstream of operating system development. The new unified operating system will more conveniently promote technological innovation, achieve ecological prosperity, and promote application landing.

Open source means co-construction and win-win, but its development is not disorderly. In 2019, the openEuler technical committee was formally established. In 2020, the openEuler Community Council was officially announced, and at the just-concluded openEuler Summit 2021, the openEuler Community Technical Committee officially ushered in an upgrade. At the same time, the conference also announced heavy news such as the donation of openEuler, injecting new color and meaning into this top summit in the operating system industry.

On September 30 this year, with the release of version 21.09 of openEuler, openEuler already includes four application scenarios: server, cloud native, edge computing, and embedded. It drives the deep integration of the physical world and the digital world through open source and continuous exploration of the boundaries of technological innovation. Of course, Euler’s upgrade is not just going his own way, but a kind of accumulation. Since the Oula open source community went online, it has attracted nearly 10,000 developers, nearly 100 interest groups, and more than 300 companies.

The road is not alone, and Germany must have neighbors. The extreme popularity of the Euler community means another successful combination and practice of the domestic operating system and the open source community. Open source means openness and tolerance, and it also means that more companies and developers work together to build a win-win situation. Euler is obviously a practitioner and beneficiary of open source. At present, mainstream domestic operating system manufacturers have launched commercial releases based on Euler and applied them to the core industries of government, operators, finance, energy, electricity, transportation, etc. system.

After this donation, Euler's embrace of open source went even further. This time, Euler’s donation to the Open Atom Open Source Foundation includes: Code and software packages: millions of lines of Huawei’s self-developed code copyrights and intellectual property licenses, more than 8,000 software packages verified by Huawei and the community; innovative projects: Huawei's innovative iSula, A-Tune, Stratovirt, and secGear projects; trademarks: openEuler and 30 Chinese and English trademark brands in the iSula, A-Tune, Stratovirt, and secGear projects; domain names: openEuler.org and its subdomains, and openEuler.io And its subdomains; community infrastructure such as service and testing system, code hosting, and community operation platform.

Huawei Vice President and President of Computing Product Line Deng Taihua promised in his speech that after Euler’s donation, Huawei will continue to invest in and promote Euler’s development from five aspects: technological innovation, ecological construction, commercial promotion, open source construction, and talent development.

Comprehensive development, technology growth and maturity under the blessing of open source

Since the last day of 2019, since openEuler, an operating system open source community for diverse computing, was formally established, openEuler has released four versions. In March last year, the release of openEuler 20.03 LTS brought a brand new Linux distribution with independent technological evolution capabilities to the Linux world; in September, the innovative version of openEuler 20.09 was released, which itself is the cohesion and embodiment of community power, and can be called an open source community. A landmark event of development; in March this year, the openEuler 21.03 kernel innovation version upgraded the kernel to 5.10, realizing multiple features such as kernel hot upgrade, memory grading expansion, and accelerating the improvement of multi-core performance;

In September this year, the openEuler 21.09 innovative version was released. This is the first community version after Euler’s new release, and it is also a version that truly realizes full-scene support. It has enhanced the features of server and cloud computing, and released key technologies such as cloud-native business hybrid CPU scheduling algorithm, containerized operating system KubeOS, and released edge and embedded versions at the same time. Of course, this is not the end. According to the rhythm of one LTS in two years, Euler will release a full-scene community LTS version in March next year, which can help partners release the final commercial release for different scenarios.

openEuler 21.09 is based on the Linux Kernel 5.10 kernel and brings 12 innovative changes in process scheduling, memory management, networking, etc. These are process scheduling optimization, kernel dynamic preemption, mremap performance optimization, per memcg lru lock, large page memory management Optimization, TLB concurrent refresh support, large page vmalloc performance optimization, OOM memory recycling algorithm, support for PAC (Pointer Authentication Code) features, support for BTI (Branch Target Identifiers) features, XDP (eXpress Data Path) support, SVA (Shared Virtual Addressing) support. In terms of storage, EulerFS creates an innovative metadata soft update technology (Soft Update) based on the pointer-based directory dual-view counting mechanism, which can reduce metadata synchronization overhead and effectively improve the file system create, unlink, mkdir, and rmdir system call performance. The file system for NVDIMM new media can replace EXT4, XFS and other file systems to meet the high-performance data storage requirements of stand-alone applications and cloud-native distributed applications.

In recent years, the development trend of cloud native has become more and more obvious. Born in open source and grown in open source, cloud native’s dependence on open source naturally does not need to be said. In the 21.09 version of openEuler, its support for cloud native is a major evolution direction. In current cloud business scenarios, there is a tidal phenomenon in interactive delay-sensitive online services, and CPU resource utilization is generally low. Mixed deployment of online and offline services is an effective way to improve resource utilization. However, the mixed deployment easily leads to large jitters in the performance of online services, and the quality of service cannot be effectively guaranteed.

openEuler is oriented to cloud-native business hybrid scenarios. It uses CPU scheduling algorithms and memory recycling algorithms. It targets interactive and other delay-sensitive services and CPU consumption and delay-insensitive business deployment scenarios. It can ensure that online tasks are CPU-friendly. Fast preemption, deterministic scheduling and operation, while suppressing offline task interference.

Edge computing is a topic that cannot be avoided in recent years. IDC predicts that China will generate 48.6 ZB of data every year in 2025. Based on the previous centralized cloud computing model, it will become increasingly difficult to solve bandwidth load, network delay, and data management costs. And other pressures. Therefore, openEuler released the edge computing version openEuler 21.09 Edge, which integrates the KubeEdge+ edge cloud collaboration framework to realize application management and deployment between edge clouds, cross-edge cloud communication, and cross-edge cloud southbound peripheral management And other basic capabilities. The framework also has basic capabilities such as unified management and distribution of edge cloud applications, which can enhance intelligent collaboration and improve AI ease of use and scenario adaptability.

5G has brought the explosion of the IoT industry, and embedded software has become the largest segment of the industrial software industry, with a market share of 57.4%. openEuler releases the embedded version openEuler 21.09 Embedded, which provides basic capabilities such as lightweight, safe and lightweight containers, opens the Yocto compilation framework, and supports lightweight customization of OS images. At the same time, the framework strengthens the security of resources such as account passwords and file permissions, and the OS default security is enabled; when light-weight container runtimes for many embedded scenes in the industry, it can support standard container image deployment and operation, and can support ARM32 and ARM64 chip architectures , Gradually expand support for PowerPC, RISC-V and other chip architectures, increase deterministic delay, industrial middleware, simulation system and other capabilities, and create operating system solutions in the embedded field.

Open source and the future, the story of forging a sword into a plough

There is no doubt that the development of the open source industry requires a sound ecology, and business is also an important part of it. For example, Redhat developed in the ecosystem of the open source operating system Linux, an ecosystem that cannot be successful without a successful business. Therefore, helping more companies achieve commercial success is also inevitable for the development of open source operating systems. Because in the field of open source, competition is no longer the core, and the partner is the theme. This is a story about the future and a story of making a sword into a plow.

Huawei does not make a commercial release of Euler. This has been doomed since the establishment of the Euler community, especially after Huawei donated openEuler to the Open Atom Open Source Foundation, it will continue to make more efforts in technological innovation, community operations, and ecological construction. Huawei will continue to use Euler's technical route in various fields such as connectivity, computing, and cloud, and use the community version as a baseline to build Huawei's own operating system version; continue to focus on product innovation in the ICT field, and provide feedback on innovation in the operating system field Open source community.

There are many business partners of openEuler. In this summit alone, there are China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom, Shanghai Stock Exchange, China Merchants Bank, Kirin Software, Kirin Principal, Tongxin Software, and Zhongke Chuang. Da, Pingao Software, Tributary Technology and other companies appeared. Many of these companies have successfully built commercial operating systems based on openEuler and released them online. The success of business will undoubtedly help the open source community to further mature and promote the healthy development of the ecology.

At the same time, the openEuler community continues to build a scene-oriented SIG to promote the continuous expansion of the openEuler application boundary. The openEuler kernel R&D team is also continuing to contribute to the Linux Kernel upstream community, including chip architecture, ACPI, memory management, file system, Media, kernel documentation, bug fixes and code refactoring for the entire kernel quality enhancement. According to the data provided by Huawei, more than 17,000 patches have been contributed to the community in more than ten years. Especially in Linux Kernel 5.10 and 5.14, the code contribution of the openEuler kernel R&D team ranks first in the world.

In terms of software, openEuler aggregates and optimizes a large number of open source software supply chains, creating a foundation for large-scale commercial operating systems for developers and enterprise users. In particular, the upstream community address for software packages, source code and upstream corresponding verification, completed the construction verification, distribution, and realization of life cycle management, creating a closed-loop and complete and transparent software supply chain management system.

The construction of an open source ecosystem is not a day’s work, especially in the operating system related fields, which is destined to be a long road. However, at this year's openEuler Summit 2021, Huawei has made a choice to make a full donation and not release a commercial version, and firmly choose to be the collaborator behind it. This effort paved the way for the development of Euler, and allowed more companies to use openEuler to bring more value, and also brought more vitality to the construction of industry and ecology.