But the complication I suppose is data-structures being accessed by drivers that reside in the core kernel and other assumptions that come with linking against a monolith program like the Linux kernel. It would be momentous to simply get Linux drivers to comply with a kernel-agnostic ABI.
If one existed, companies would not be compelled to release their drivers' source, and would just release closed source drivers. As it stands, kernel drivers must be open source because the kernel API/ABI changes, and drivers must be recompiled against new kernel releases. It's infeasible to release a compiled driver .ko and have it work with new kernel releases.
Similarly, companies will not be incentivized to mainline their drivers for hardware outside of hobbists' interests. We're blessed with a plethora of drivers for enterprise, cloud and industry hardware that would otherwise have never been released beyond vendors' customers' deployments.
What would happen to the Linux driver ecosystem is what happened with Nintendo, Sony, Apple and FreeBSD. You get closed source drivers siloed away in proprietary systems that will never be released. The deployed drivers will come with restrictions on use and distribution, as well, so it wouldn't be like you could pluck out compatible drivers to use elsewhere.
It's not. At Ksplice we had a build farm and whenever a supported distro would release a new kernel, we would generate new .ko files for that kernel, usually within 24 hours. It was a lot of work, and very much specific to the Ksplice product. These days, between docker and DKMS, and limiting yourself to supporting a specific device, you'd have a much easier time of building a build farm to release a compiled .ko, if you were a hardware manufacturer that wanted to support that.
Plan 9 does this but instead of a binary interface that exposes machine details it hides them behind 9P, a simple RPC file tree protocol. This same protocol is also served by user space programs so it's universal. The benefit of all this is the system is small and very light weight. Its an OS a single human can grok from kernel to user space.
Since 9p abstracts everything it's kernel and language agnostic. A Plan 9 kernel can be written in Rust and serve the same 9P tree to a Plan 9 written in C, Go, Zig, D, etc. The user space drivers and services can also be written in any language as well as the programs accessing them. 9P is machine agnostic so a Plan 9 network can be made of disparate machine architectures letting you mix x86, Arm, Power, Mips, Risc-V, etc. Stupid simple cross compiling is an out of the box feature, just change the objtype env variable.
I can export those devices/services to other systems using 9P, cifs, nfs, and so on. I can export the sound device of a Plan 9 machine using cifs to a Windows box and a Windows program could open that file and play sound by writing 16bit stereo audio to it.
Your data structures are then pretty strait forward, e.g audio(3): "Audio data is a sequence of stereo samples, left sample first. Each sample is a 16 bit little-endian two's complement integer; the default sampling rate is 44.1 kHz." http://man.postnix.pw/9front/3/audio
It's a fantastic concept which frees all the services and hardware from the confines of a old school POSIX/Unix machine. Since Plan 9 in NOT Unix you also don't have to worry about crusty old POSIX. It has its own C dialect that is mostly C99 compliant and a very nice C library that beats smelly old ANSI C. I highly recommend learning how it works and giving it a go. Its not for everyone but man, I really dig how its just a patch-bay of networked 9P stuff. Wiring up a network of machines and hardware is ezpz.
Here one famous one from early 1980s, there others to read about, for anyone into compiler tooling history,
Most other OSes have had driver ABIs throughout all their existence.
Could anyone give an overview of what Huawei and Vivo are doing? I understand it’s mostly RTOS to use on phone. How does it compare to QNX and Linux? Is it as ambitious as Fuchsia?
Apparently they are shipping. It’s weird that we have reached a point where there seem to be two worlds not talking to each other much.
I'm not Chinese but I can only support such efforts that make everyone less reliable on main actors. That said they even share their work so it's not like they are going full mute.
I expect technological development to explode and my advice is for anyone interested in it to learn Mandarin. Including myself.
My father said the exact same thing in the 80's but it was Japanese.
For years I've had this issue with pretty much everything happening in China, from business to politics to culture. For me personally, getting a window into China has been the number one game changer with LLMs. It's easier than ever to find and digest Chinese sources.
Or are the most motivated to push a narrative in relation to it.
I feel that it is quite obvious the next century will have China leading the pack, and I'd really like to be able to prepare for that.
China Media Project (media analysis) - https://chinamediaproject.org/
China Leadership Monitor (political analysis) - https://www.prcleader.org/
Made in China Journal (social analysis) - https://madeinchinajournal.com/
What's on Weibo (pop culture reporting) - https://www.whatsonweibo.com/
The China Project (formerly SupChina, general reporting) - https://thechinaproject.com/
* edit to add: seems like The China Project shut down end of 2023, but leaving the link for context
Sixth Tone (state-owned media specializing in human interest stories) - https://www.sixthtone.com/
On the state-owned media tip there are also more blatant propaganda outlets like Global Times, People's Daily etc, plus private-owned media that largely toe the party line like South China Morning Post.
There are also a set of mostly US-based thinktanks that do solid macro-level reporting on geopolitical and economic issues, guys like Jamestown, CSIS, German Marshall Fund etc.
Then there are countless blogs and newsletters and influencers who report on specific niches, everything from economic analysis to boyslove fandom... You can jump on Bilibili to watch shows and see all the "bullet chat" jargon and memes, you can rub shoulders with the upper middle class on Xiaohongshu, read millions of Steam reviews or check out the forums of games popular in China, follow ABC or expat channels on YouTube etc. I find it very hard to believe that people in 2025 can't find any information about what's going on in China.
All that said, I do share the sense that there is a bit a trough between Chinese tech workers and foreign tech workers, and it's because most Chinese tech workers don't tend to prioritize learning English to the same degree that tech workers around the rest of the world do. There are lots of publications that report on the Chinese tech industry from an investor or economic perspective, probably written by all those MBAs who went to study overseas, but nerd-to-nerd level exchange is lacking imo. I suppose you could ask an LLM to summarize content from v2ex.com (HN-ish Reddit), tieba.baidu.com (Reddit-ish Reddit), segmentfault.com (StackOverflow) etc, but that doesn't really do much to engage in a social way so I'm not sure if it's what you're looking for. Chinese-language Github projects are one place you could explore, if you specifically want to interact with developers over there.
China is mindblowingly huge. There has to be A LOT happening at any one time.
It's challenging for open source communities in the west to collaborate with their counterparts in China primarily because of language, but also the collaborations can't really happen in the public places that we're all used to. Western social platforms are blocked in China, and Chinese social platforms are not appealing to the west for one reason or another. Even places like Github are frequently blocked on partially inaccessible in China.
So there really just isn't any good place for people to meet and collaborate, and learn from each other.
They created a brand new microkernel with Linux ABI and driver support in containers? Or... did they just slightly fork Linux and pretend they invented it?
Some might argue that this is intentional, but to me, this more likely shows that HarmonyOS is just a hard fork of Android without sources released and, likely, with their own virtual machine implementation (ARK instead of ART).
Especially if that was just one component of a supposedly entirely new OS that quickly replaced something decades established without regressing user experience or features
https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-h...
Harvey is Plan 9 built with a GCC/Clang tool chain instead of the Plan 9 tools. AFAIK both projects are abandoned (edit: R9 might still be alive) and most devs have moved on to 9front which is a modern fork of Plan 9.
https://github.com/vivoblueos/book/blob/main/src/SUMMARY.md
All of these repos are days old.
