I’d love to try out some of their products, but my government has banned them. So much for the land of the free.
even if you got them; you’re going to encounter some stupid rules:
i bought at xiaomi phone and i can’t use it on most cell phone carriers in the united states because they’re banned based on their imea to please uncle sam; so it doesn’t matter that it’s capable of working, it’s just not allowed.
same is true for hearing aids: when i connect them using ordinary bluetooth, they work fine on both my xiaomi and samsung phones; but when i use the recommended software, they only work on the samsung and their tech support told me that they don’t work on “banned” hardware like xiaomi or huawei.
i bet, in the near future, huawei’s hardware will be banned from connecting to wifi networks based on thier mac address and american smart phones will refuse to share data w then via hotspot for the same reason.
I do not belive it feasible to police personal consumer WAPs or force mac address filtering on them. Perhaps they will block the mac addresses on govt APs.
The rabbit hole I went into to get my smartphone to work in this country has taught me that Google silently placed controls that American carriers wanted into all Android builds since at least version 12 so it’s not hard to imagine that the likes of Netgear or Linksys doing something similar to the stock firmware of thier home routers in the near future, when Uncle Sam inevitably tells them to.
In at&t’s & signia’s case: Uncle Sam hasn’t said anything yet, they decided to pre-comply out of their own accord; so it doesn’t even have to be a law.
This leak is really scetchy, tbh. If it’s real then it’s probably happening because of the HarmonyOS NEXT that came out late last year. With that they basically dropped the previously used custom android/linux kernel for their own totally own proprietary HarmonyOS kernel. However with that they also lost support for android and linux code sideloading in the process and replaced it with some linux translation layer.
I always thought that HarmonyOS was meant to be more of a Android replacement that also had it’s place in stuff like TVs, cars, IoT and smart devices, but they still tried PCs with it, but it was more like chromebook-like toy computer for web browsing and text editing than a full pc. It seemed like a competent product android and android smart device replacement, but I never saw it as a serious competitor for Windows, MacOS or Linux desktop. If them plan is just be self sufficient and ditch US code, then you can do more in the linux ecosystem and get more app support right out of the gate and not have to ask everybody to rewrite their code for your custom OS. With linux-laptops they will have global markets for their computers, when as Harmony OS and it’s still are best in China’s own ‘software lagoon’ where third parties care more about developing for Huawei app store.
Yeah, it seems counterproductive to ditch FOSS in the name of self-sufficiency. If it were about that, assembling an army of software people to learn and contribute to important FOSS codebases would be much more productive in my opinion. It feels like Harmony Next is about something else. Perhaps some wholesale insurance. Or someone’s plans grandeur.
wonder if they use riscv chips
RISC-V is just about at pi3 levels of performance so it’s not really that good for end user stuff yet. Alibaba launched a new core recently that might improve things though.
On their servers? possibly. RISC-V is competitive when you stuff a bunch of cores into it and make it do basic server tasks that haven’t gotten more complex over the years. And in AI, you may just need a cheap CPU to orchestrate your GPUs/NPUs so anything will work there.
I think we’ll see m1+ levels of desktop performance on RISCV within the next 4 years though. trump will do wonders for the Chinese semiconductor industry.
Yeah, pi3 isn’t quite there yet to drive a laptop. I expect RISCV to mature rapidly as well. There’s going to be a ton of money poured into it, and it’s always easier to do things the second time around. Apple has done a lot of the hard work designing the architecture o M series chips, and I imagine a lot of it will inspire RISCV designs now. This project in particular seems pretty promising as it specifically aims to deliver high performance designs https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan
what’s harmony OS?
Huawei’s android skin/variant, akin to OneUI for samsung, OxygenOS for Oneplus, HyperOS for Xiaomi.
It was a skin, now its a completely different OS. The initial version, HarmonyOS, was based on Android/Linux, the new HarmonyOS Next, is a proprietary version (or successor) of HarmonyOS based on an open source project/OS, OpenHarmony. It uses a new microkernel instead of the linux kernel.
OpenHarmony is essentially an open source base for making an operating system on top. Its not like the Linux kernel, in the sense that its not just a kernel (in fact you can use the linux kernel with it), but rather a bunch of components people can build upon. And since it uses a permissive license, you can build a proprietary OS on top of it (like the HarmonyOS Next).
Huawei actually launched OpenHarmony many years back but it was not ready for phone usage yet. It was only with the launch of the 5th version that Huawei was confident enough in it to start using it on their own phones.
Do you know where to find the HongMeng kernel? I couldn’t find in OpenHarmony gitee.
Unfortunately it seems to be a completely proprietary kernel. I did find a paper on it (presented by Huawei in a conference): https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-haibo
The first line of the abstract reads
This paper presents the design and implementation of HongMeng kernel (HM), a commercialized general-purpose microkernel that preserves most of the virtues of microkernels while addressing the above challenges.
Another interesting tidbit from the paper:
We started the HongMeng kernel (HM) project over 7 years ago to re-examine and retrofit the microkernel into a general OS kernel for emerging scenarios. To be practical for production deployment, HM achieves full Linux API/ABI compatibility and is capable of reusing the Linux applications and driver ecosystems such that it can run complex frameworks like AOSP [42] and OpenHarmony [35] with rich peripherals.
Yeah I only find this which is bit technical. Anything else seems marketing bs. Seems like they’re making something similar to fuchsia by google but with linux abi compatibility.
Having linux shim alone makes it effectively monolithic like xnu.They even claim this by saying linux shim will hold global state in this otherwise microkernel.
Huawei’s android skin/variant
No, it’s not anymore, never really was. They dropped even the last android parts from it with HarmonyOS NEXT last year.
I think it is more of a hard fork after the embargo
Not even a fork. New code.
A Huawei version of Android.
Important clarification: it’s much more than this. HarmonyOS is not any more a skin or a version of Android. It’s its own OS.
HarmonyOS is IMO going to do to Android what BYD has done to Tesla and VW. This is another chapter in China declaring independence from the West.
So their laptops were running Android?
Reading the article it was a closed source OS, with their own closed-source Linux-based kernel.
Their laptops were running Windows / Linux, and this article is saying that while they initially planned to shift to HarmonyOS Next, they are now likely to stay with Linux.
Also, while HarmonyOS Next is proprietary, the kernel (Hongmeng, a microkernel optimised for arm64 and with a Linux compatibility layer) and large parts of the underlying code (OpenHarmony) are open-source. Sort of like Android and AOSP. The ‘optimised for arm64’ thing might be why they are sticking with Linux - the laptops mostly use Intel x86 chips.
They should offer fydeOS too
