It’s a rare event when a new operating system comes along. And it’s even rarer to have the opportunity to influence the direction of that OS at its earliest stages. So I’m delighted to tell you that today we are announcing a new working group and top-level project that gives you that opportunity. The Oniro community will nurture and evolve the Oniro operating system, a transparent, vendor-neutral, and independent OS for the next generation of distributed systems.
The Oniro OS will provide a true, community-driven open source solution that runs on a wider spectrum of devices than today’s operating systems. And it will make it far easier to integrate different types of next-gen hardware and software.
Architected to Go Beyond Today’s Operating Systems
The Oniro OS can run on more devices than current operating systems because it features a multi-kernel architecture:
- A Linux Yocto kernel allows the OS to run on larger embedded devices, such as Raspberry Pi-class devices
- A Zephyr kernel allows the OS to run on highly resource-constrained devices, such as a coffee maker or a thermostat
With the ability to run the same OS on different classes of devices, Oniro will provide an ideal solution to support the future of IoT, machine economy, edge, mobile, and other next-gen devices:
- Consumers and adopters of the Oniro OS will have a more seamless experience than they have with the current generation of operating systems.
- Devices will be able to directly connect to one another and share data, enabling a much higher degree of interoperability than is possible today.
- Data exchanged between devices can flow directly to one another rather than always being shared via the cloud, enabling low latency architectures which are also inherently more secure and private.
We expect the initial use cases for Oniro will be in the IoT and industrial IoT domains with applications for mobile devices coming later as the community evolves, grows, and establishes its roadmap.
Enabling the Global Ecosystem for OpenHarmony
Oniro is an independent open source implementatio of OpenAtom’s OpenHarmony. To deliver on the promise of Oniro, the community will deliver an independent, but compatible implementation of the OpenHarmony specifications, tailored for the global market. OpenHarmony is based on HarmonyOS, a multi-kernel OS that was developed by Huawei and contributed to the OpenAtom Foundation last year. In the future Oniro will also deliver additional specifications to help drive global adoption.
By creating a compatible implementation of OpenHarmony, the Oniro community can ensure that applications built for Oniro will run on OpenHarmony and vice versa. This interoperability will allow the Oniro community to create a global ecosystem and marketplace for applications and services that can be used across both operating systems, anywhere in the world.
Join an Innovative Open Source Community
I truly believe that Oniro is open source done right. It’s a huge opportunity to build an operating system that rethinks how devices across many different device classes can interoperate in a secure and privacy-preserving way.
Because Oniro’s evolution is being guided by an open and vendor-neutral community using the Eclipse Development Process, openness and transparency are a given. This will go a long way towards building the engagement and stakeholder trust necessary to create the global ecosystem.
The founding members of the Oniro Working Group include telecom giant, Huawei, Arm software experts Linaro, and industrial IoT specialists Seco. As more organizations become aware of Oniro, we expect the community to encompass organizations of all sizes and from all industries.
I strongly encourage everyone with an interest in next-gen devices — corporations, academics, individuals — to take the opportunity to get involved in Oniro in its earliest stages. To get started, join the Oniro conversation by subscribing to the Oniro working group list.
