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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? "

1 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. 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).