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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

4 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. but does it run linux? by sumdumass · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Seriously though, how can security be handled at that small of a foot print?

  2. kernel 10K by dmitrygr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    the kernel is > 2mb nowadays. how did they get in into 10K?

    --
    -------
    1. Enjoy your job
    2. Make lots of money
    3. Work within the law

    Choose any two.
  3. Re: Old fart's claims finally justified. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Of course this is smaller than any usable OS. It's just a packet spammer like every other IoT piece of shit. All it can do is bitch about its 1 or 2 sensors and expose your wifi creds.

  4. Incorrect by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It is easier with something simpler, not something smaller. When you start doing extreme optimization for size, as in this case, you are going to do it at the expense of many things, checks being one of them. If you want to have good security, particularly for something that can be hit with completely arbitrary and hostile input like something on the network, you want to do good data checking and sanitization. Well guess what? That takes code, takes memory, takes cycles. You start stripping everything down to basics, stuff like that may go away.

    What's more, with really tiny code sizes, particularly for complex items like an OS, what you are often doing is using assembly, or at best C, which means that you'd better be really careful, but there is a lot of room to fuck up. You mess up one pointer and you can have a major vulnerability. Now you go and use a managed language or the like and the size goes up drastically... but of course that management framework can deal with a lot of issues.