Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

China Announces Unix-compatible Server OS

Posted by Hemos on from the the-red-giant-awakes dept.

swe writes " It looks as though the Chinese government has come up with their own Operating System. Called, Kylin, it is focused on high performance, availability and security. The kernel is similar to Mach with BSD-like system service layer and Windows-like desktop environment. It is supposedly Unix standards compliant and is also compatible with Linux binaries. Could there be another contender? "

5 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Who would use this without a gun to their head? by adb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have enough trouble trusting NSA-enhanced Linux. What are the chances this doesn't have nasty spyware and/or censorware built right in?

  2. Not credible by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I was going to post a comment about how amateur and untrustworthy the project looks, but somebody beat me to it:

    If this is real at all, it clearly borrows heavily from some well known BSD licensed unixlike codebase (almost certainly Darwin, given their claims of Mach kernel services). Nobody, not even the Chinese government, is going to write an OS this feature-complete from scratch and spring it on us out of the blue. Even so, this would be a big step forward for Darwin: some of the features claimed (SSI clustering, NUMA support, SELinux-like MACs) have only been available in Linux and commercial Unices until now. So let me just say, if this is real, it's great.

    Unfortunately, this seems unlikely to me. The website for this project is so unprofessional that I doubt it was produced by a team capable of creating this software. The following are strikes against them:

    -The website is poorly translated, ridiculously unprofessional, makes very vague and grandiose claims, and shows only tiny screenshots that could well be KDE on Linux.

    -They claim GRUB was "ported" to Kylin, yet their OS is quite obviously familiar enough that no port would be necessary: they're using Mach, and they certainly did not invent a new filesystem.

    -They claim IA64 but not PPC support, Darwin is all about PPC but does not support IA64.

    -They claim not only an astounding level of feature parity with Linux, but also extraordinary compatibility - they even claim to be LSB compliant!!

    Are we to believe that the Chinese government poured enough money into this project for enough time for them to achieve such an amazing result, then had someone who couldn't do webdesign OR speak english spend 10 minutes on a website that is essentially one page of vague claims that reveal technical ignorance. A release announcment without even a download link? No way - it would be humiliating, and doesn't reflect the level of dedication that would be required to create such software.

    This is most likely vaporware, and I'd even doubt it has anything to do with the government. If we do eventually see a download, I'd bet that it's an illegal and poorly put together Linux distribution with an OpenSSI kernel that hasn't got a trace of Mach or BSD anywhere.

    synthespian, David Adams and Eugenia are all gullible, more so, it seems, than any Slashdot editors (this story remains conspicuously absent there).

    1. Re:Not credible by Jerf · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Boy, China is really starting to remind me of the old Soviet Union; a Communist country panicking the free world by looking like it is about to take over a technological lead... but lacking the necessary culture to do that. Substituting for the necessary culture and true innovation and progress, they pour all of their resources into looking like they are progressing, doing well in the Olympics, some token tech program (space-based in the USSR case, possibly China's too), a city or two full of tech and photo ops, and some good people, but no real infrastructure or progress. The USSR did stuff like this too, only they didn't have something as easy to snarf as an open-source software base.

      The USSR panicked a lot of people, and I am strongly suspecting China is going to do the same thing over the next couple of decades. Once the USSR fell, though, lo and behold they were borderline a third-world country overall.

      If history has taught us anything, it is that only an open culture can truly make radical progress, but any culture can put on a good show to a credulous audience (which China will have in spades, the same audience that really wanted the USSR to win). When China starts truly democratizing and breeding people who are not just free in body, but free in spirit, then I will really start to "worry". (Not really; successful democratic countries don't really worry me.) In the meantime, appearence is easy, substance is hard. Try to avoid the mistake of being taken in by appearence.

      (Anyone about to whack the "reply" button to set me straight, I would ask that any arguments you make that China truly is about to become some sort of uber-powerhouse not apply equally to the USSR in 1985, and the US perception of the USSR in 1985. I'm sure there are good reasons on both sides; my point here is not that it is impossible, but that arguments that sound like they are coming straight out of 1985 w.r.t. the USSR aren't going to convince me. We've seen what kind of innovation powerhouse a major Communist country is, and token economic freedoms here or there really don't mean much; the shockwave only occurs when you are really, truly free, like the computer industry of twenty years ago. (On that note, I'd also point out I'm not trying to say everything in the US is hunky-dory, since some weak thinkers always see everything in terms of competition, and that if someone says X is bad, they simply must mean that the thing opposing X is good. I'm only talking about China's putative progress.))

      (Even if this isn't from the government of China, I think it still says something about the culture.)

  3. Twenty years ago... by dimss · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...there were "soviet" OSes for IBM 360 and 370 clones. Of course, they were just repackaged VM and VMS.

  4. The contrast is the point. by adb · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yes, the NSA's modifications to Linux are open and subject to peer review, and the US government is at least somewhat bound by the Constitution and doesn't usually round people up and execute them because of their politiccs, so it is probably reasonable to overcome one's paranoia and trust them despite the fact that they are a secretive government agency whose primary purpose is spying on electronic communications. The paranoia is there nonetheless.

    Meanwhile, in the case of a closed-source product out of China, the mitigating factors I just mentioned are not there at all.