Huawei begins testing the beta version of HarmonyOS 2.0

After the Trump administration announced that it included Huawei on its blacklist and several months of speculation and what the company could do to continue in the market for smartphones and tablets, HarmonyOS was unveiled, an operating system which "Huawei had been working on" for months in order to leave dependency on Android for their computers.

And well, now the beta version of the HarmonyOS 2.0 operating system has been released and this beta can be tested on the following Huawei equipment, «Huawei P40, P40 Pro, Mate30 and Mate30 Pro, as well as for the MatePad Pro tablet ». The user interface is based on EMUI 11, which is also used in Huawei devices based on the Android platform.

Let us remember that the project Harmony has been in development since 2017 and is a microkernel operating system. The project developments are released under the BSD license as part of the OpenHarmony project, which is overseen by the non-profit organization China Open Atomic Open Source Foundation.

The HarmonyOS 2.0 Mobile Phone Developer Beta has improved the following features:

• More than 15000 APIs (support development of applications for mobile phones / PADs, large screens, handheld devices, cars and machines)

• Distributed application framework

• Distributed user interface controls

• DevEco Studio 2.0 Beta3

Of the HarmonyOS features that stand out, the following are mentioned:

The core of the system is verified at a formal logic / math level to minimize the risk of vulnerabilities. The verification was performed using methods that are commonly used in critical system development in areas such as aviation and astronautics, and can achieve EAL 5+ security level compliance.

The micronucleus is isolated from external devices, while the system is decoupled from the hardware and allows developers to create applications that can be used on different categories of devices without creating separate packages.

The microkernel only implements the scheduler and IPC, and everything else is carried over to system services, most of which run in user space, plus the deterministic latency engine, which analyzes load in real time and uses methods to predict application behavior , is proposed as a task scheduler. Compared to other systems, the scheduler achieves a 25,7% reduction in latency and a 55,6% reduction in latency jitter.

Moreover, to provide communication between the microkernel and the external kernel services, such as the file system, network stack, drivers, and application launch subsystem, IPC is used, which, according to the company, is five times faster than IPC on Zircon and three times faster than IPC on QNX.

Instead of the protocol stack four-layer commonly used to reduce overload, Harmony OS uses a simplified single layer model based on a distributed virtual bus that communicates with hardware such as displays, cameras, sound cards, and the like.

The system does not provide user access at root level (There is no regular global superuser, but there are privileged system processes.) To access privileged operations, selective granting based on capacity is used in relation to process IDs. Custom apps also require separate permissions for camera and microphone access.
The application is built with its own Arc compiler, which supports C, C ++, Java, JavaScript, and Kotlin code.

To create applications for various classes of devices, such as televisions, smart phones, smart watches, car information systems, etc., a universal framework is provided for developing interfaces and SDKs with an integrated development environment. The toolkit will automatically tailor applications for different screens, controls, and user interaction methods. It also mentions providing Harmony with customization tools for existing Android apps with minimal changes.

Finally if you want to know more about it about this beta version, you can check the following link.

The first smartphones based on the new operating system are scheduled to go on sale in October 2021.


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