"Huawei claims that Harmony OS' IPC performance is five times that of Google's Fuchsia, and three times that of QNX."
Which I find fascinating. If they were building this as a Fuchsia competitor and are forced now to push it to market we could see rapid innovation on both sides of the divide actually coming to market soon!
I also find the "smaller than Linux" claims rather strange. ANY microkernel will be smaller. Once you add those things back (at an almost insignificantly higher abstraction), I'm betting things get to be around the same size or slightly larger. I can't speak for other people, but I rather like not having to do the old driver search routine I did on Windows for every little thing.
Yes, and that rotten thing is the app ecosystem. Without apps, nobody will use your smartphone. From what I've seen, HarmonyOS tries to be compatible with Android, but knowing the difficulty Microsoft and Blackberry had with getting the Android API to work a few years ago (before the many complications that have been layered on top since), I don't expect much from it.
I think a switch of mobile OS will go down about as well as Windows Phone. Only if they port most important apps and games (phone gaming is big in China), their custom OS just won't get the popularity to get its own full app ecosystem.
even for Huawei, there will be some 3rd party apps. and most people spend almost all of their time on a small set of apps anyway. as long as the critically important apps (there are probably only a couple hundred) to most users are available AND Huawei offers some other benefits (e.g. relativeily low price for good HW), maybe an app store with millions of apps is not critical to success any more?
What is different now than when Windows Phone flopped? They had tens of thousands of phone apps (although I can't find an exact number), and it clearly wasn't enough.
People spend most of their time on the very small number of big name social media apps, some games, and email, camera and texting apps. ok, so maybe it's more like 1000 apps. IDK. but, if those are all present at the launch of the Huawei store, then a lot of users will say "good enough for me." Huawei could do the market research, figure out what those apps are, and then incentivize those app devs to port to Huawei.
And I am pretty sure ALL Apps and Games in China will be ported to HarmonyOS.
Huawei makes up about a third of the Chinese smart phone market according to counterpoint.com[1]. If Huawei were to drop Android, that would be a huge win for Vivo, Oppo and Xiaomi, not necessarily a huge loss for Android.
[1]: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/china-smartphone-share/
Edit:
Fro my perspective as a Chinese living in bay area. So far Huawei largely benefited more than being harmed. For one thing, it firmly established itself as the beacon of Chinese tech superiority over other domestic competitor, and gains unmeasurable good will from the Chinese people. This obvious helps propell their possible dominance of the smartphone market, and helps with their Cloud business as well.
This is also why BAT and other tech companies are largely indifference to Huawei's situation. On the one hand, it's sensitive. On the other hand, they are in situation where might be forced to play cooperatively to Huawei's own benefits.
context: it sounds like there's a modular Linux kernel in it too to support running existing Android/Linux apps.
Developer Developer Developer ... Aka. ecosystem ...
They are at it for a long time already.
Minix runs on a large amount of Intel CPUs.
Both Windows and macOS derived OSes, even though they aren't proper micro-kernels, have been slowly migrating stuff over to user space and increasing the sandboxing surface area.
Given the new DriverKit, Apple's long term roadmap is to remove all driver APIs and replace them by user space ones. As stated at WWDC, when DriverKit will get feature X, the corresponding feature at kernel level gets automatically deprecated and will be removed in the following version. Until after a couple of macOS releases there won't be anything left to migrate over to DriverKit.
One of the results of Project Treble was to introduce a new userspace layer for drivers, since Android 8, all new drivers are required to be userspace drivers. Only legacy drivers are allowed as classical Linux drivers.
So yeah, they are still a thing.
As for freedom, that is the outcome of the anti-GPL movement, and push for BSD like licenses.
We make fools of ourselves trying to guess what chocolate factory is doing.
So, yeah, microkernels are kind of still a thing.
I do not know of their design, but I know some helenos devs are involved, so it's sure to be a proper microkernel multiserver system.
seL4 is just the kernel. Linux can have software with a range of licenses in userspace, so can seL4.
A system based on seL4 would be built as a bunch of services running under seL4, rather than by modifying seL4.