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Huawei's LiteOS Internet of Things Operating System Is a Minuscule 10KB
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
security is easier with a small footprint than a large one.
640k was enough after all.
The operating system will be open for developers to tinker with
and suddenly it becomes 10mb.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
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.
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.
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
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.
..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
the kernel is > 2mb nowadays. how did they get in into 10K?
Lossy compression.
#DeleteChrome
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.
Does anyone remember the tear-down of Huawei's router OS, presented at DEFCON 20? Why would you let those people anywhere near your hardware?
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.
I'm guessing that joke's a lot funnier outside of the United States.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Only an idiot would buy a fridge. I build my own.