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Huawei's LiteOS Internet of Things Operating System Is a Minuscule 10KB

Posted by samzenpus on from the in-the-future dept.

Mark Wilson writes: Chinese firm Huawei today announces its IoT OS at an event in Beijing. The company predicts that within a decade there will be 100 billion connected devices and it is keen for its ultra-lightweight operating system to be at the heart of the infrastructure. Based on Linux, LiteOS weighs in at a mere 10KB — smaller than a Word document — but manages to pack in support for zero configuration, auto-discovery, and auto-networking. The operating system will be open for developers to tinker with, and is destined for use in smart homes, wearables, and connected vehicles. LiteOS will run on Huawei's newly announced Agile Network 3.0 Architecture and the company hopes that by promoting a standard infrastructure, it will be able to push the development of internet and IoT applications

8 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Re:but does it run linux? by thegarbz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    security is easier with a small footprint than a large one.

  2. open? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No mention of the license. "Tinker" isn't sufficient.

    This is Huawei; the electronics arm of the PLA.

    Not touching any of their work without a full open source BSD style license.

    Neither will anyone else.

    1. Re:open? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's China. What makes you think that a BSD style licence, or any other licence based on western copyright law, would make any difference?

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  3. Old fart's claims finally justified. by JustNiz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This story seems to confirm my ongoing claim that a minimal Windows install taking 15Gb+ of disk space and using over 1GB of ram just to run is BEYOND crazy. ...but then I'm also old enough to remember when a bootable MsDOS environment used up about 1/3 of a 1.2mb floppy.
    Now get off my lawn.

  4. Re:Ba! 10kb? Luxury! by msauve · · Score: 3, Insightful
    4K? What a luxury. My KIM-1 only has 1152 bytes of RAM of which 256 bytes are the stack, plus another 2K of ROM. But then again, it was

    intended to provide you with a capable microcomputer for use in your "real-world" application.

    Who needs graphics and sound? I've got a 20 mA current loop interface for an ASR-33 (which does make lots of sound, now that I think about it).

    Get off my lawn.

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
  5. The art of doing more with less by MpVpRb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ..seems to be forgotten

    Old time programmers remember squeezing every bit of performance out of a system

    I remember doing image processing on a 4MHz 8088, in 1986, in assembly

    Modern processors are INSANELY powerful..yet, most of the power is wasted on layers and layers of crap that incompetent programmers don't even realize is there

    We need to re-discover efficiency in programming

  6. It's not Linux-based by Jonner · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The claims are ludicrous on their face. No Linux-based has ever been as small as 10KiB. Even the earliest distributions of Linux-based operating systems in the early 1990s required a couple of floppies.

  7. Re:Incorrect by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I doubt this is really super optimized for size. More likely, it's really just a very, very basic OS with the absolute bare minimum of functionality. Think glorified bootloader for a single process with a bunch of libraries for basic stuff like simple filesystem and TCP/IP networking. Getting all that into 10K is not particularly difficult, and the code is likely pretty straightforward C.