Kylin, a server OS focusing on high performance, availability and security, that was funded by a Chinese government-sponsored R&D program, has been announced. Kylin has been organized in a hierarchy model, including the basic kernel layer which is similar to Mach, the system service layer which is similar to BSD and the desktop environment which is similar to Windows. It has been designed to comply with the UNIX standards and is compatible with Linux binaries. Unfortunately, the download page is currently nonfunctional.
It shouldn’t be too bad. Can’t 100% trust the binaries, but it can always be compiled.. Unless you compile it with their own compiler that might transparently inject code while compiling
It’s been done before, but why delve into all these conspiracy theories?
You can see screenshots btw in the document PDF files.
I wonder, if they got a Mach kernel, a BSD layer, and Linux compat.. Did they use Darwin?
If you go to: http://www.kylin.org.cn/index.html
It’s also in english and you have images
What happened to this project:
“China to build own version of Windows 98”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/07/19/china_to_build_own_version/
It looks like KDE 2
Use this URL and navigate from there:
http://www.kylin.org.cn
Also you can try:
http://www.kylin.org.cn/chinese/_index_c.htm
I think the screenshot on the right (it’s very small by the way) is actually KDE since it says that this OS is compatible with Linux apps and supports Gnome and KDE.
Heh, yeah. It looks like KDE. If you bothered to *read* the text just above the picture, it states: “Kylin also supports both Gnome and KDE.”
What I don’t find in the page is the reasoning for China public sector funding this project. What’s so special about this OS that couldn’t be implemented as a bunch of patches to Linux? What (user-visible) features of Linux were unsatisfactory? Of course research is always good (and provides ideas for Linux enhancements), but reinventing all of the wheel does not make any sense. At least with taxpayer money – volunteer development is another thing.
It probably is linux with a bunch of patches.
They probably just have a different way of expressing themselves.
Well, if you look even further, you will see that the page is sponsored by the “National University of Defence Technology.” My guess is that re-inventing the wheel and keeping it closed-source are two very important reasons to develop operating systems with taxpayer money. I am aware that DARPA does fund many open source products, but imagine how many computers in the US defence program are not running OSS systems.
Now, think of where those propietary systems come from…most of them come from American companies. China is not willing to rely on foreign companies for its National Security.
My guess is that this OS is not for wide release, but I am sure it will have its use.
Answer is simple. Because the can. I don’t know if you’ve been in China for the las 3 years but everything is moving very fast. China has a greater interior market than USA and if the launch there own DVD (for example), they don’t even need to sell them outside to get margins. So why a specific OS when copyright in China means nothing for people ? Because at one point, China *real* industry will need to make market with the *outside world* and to do so, apply copyrights. Having it own OS is a great advantage to help it’s industrials. Other reason is independency. A country like China will never accept to let huge company link MS rule inside its boudaries. MS try to sell cheap OS to asiatic countries, China will just give them it answer. European countries are completly dependent on Windows. I don’t think China could accept to let other country control its IT like we accept to do. Even linux is not chineese so can’t be wildly used in the country.
I’m not chineese, I just spent some time it China and what I discovered is far from what European ou American media show them. Cheap industry and cheap knoledge. They learn quickly, quicker than indea actually and they are starving to death. This is a huge country and even if some *events* can’t be addressed in public, freedom is also growing quickly.
Ok, writing to much now and using a very poor english. Sorry about that
“It probably is linux with a bunch of patches. ”
Have you read ?
->” including the basic kernel layer which is similar to Mach”
No linux at all …
I am sure the NSA would love to get a hold of the source code for Kylin to see if the Chinese used SELinux and RSBAC, and how much did they modify it for Kylin.
It would be very interesting to paly with regardless.
This appears somewhere in the documentation:
# Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass#
/dev/ad0s2b none swap sw 0 0
/dev/ad0s1a / ufs rw 1 1
/dev/ad0s3d /home ufs rw 2 2
Those device names are like those of FreeBSD (not NetBSD or OpenBSD, btw.) Could it be that it is based on Darwin?
But then, one page later:
# mkswap -c /dev/hda3
Weird.
http://www.kylin.org.cn/index.html
That’s running KDE 2.x with a Chinese-language UI
I wonder how the government of the People’s Republic feels on open-source licencing.
Please, there’s much more information there. Kylin is pretty impressive: cluster support built-in, ACL, MAC, capabilities (now, /that/ I thought was impressive and edgy) Mach-based kernel, J2EE and apps “out of the box”, POSIX and LSB compliant, Linux binary support, etc, etc,…
It just looks sooo much better than the other similar projects. If this is released under a resonable open-source license, it’s going to shake the landscape.
I think this is an interesting project. There isn’t anything too revolutionary seeing as though they admit many things that look nearly identical to Darwin. I hope they have the source available (they probably will). I think that the Chinese government, if for no reason other than national pride, would love for a huge developer community to grow around this project.
It’s interesting. Right now, there are many different UNIX-like OSs all with different supporters. There’s Linux with RedHat, Novell, IBM and others behind it. Mach/BSD with Apple and now the Chinese government behind it. The BSD flavors which don’t seem to have anyone other than their users/developers pushing it (which is weird because, as someone who has run BSDs and Linuxes, it isn’t as if there is a clear winner there and with BSD’s much more liberal license, you’d think that more companies would get involved). Then there’s Solaris which Sun wants to eclipse Linux with. It’ll be neat to see if Linux remains the dominant one here.
It’s hard to get excited about a Mach kernel and a Windows desktop, but the BSD system service layer might be spiffy.
Maybe it’s based on The Hurd 🙂
i doubt they’ve developed the operating system on their own codes. i think they’ve largely based their project on many other open source projects. i know if they chose the projects with BSD-like licenses for their base, no one can complain even if they do not release the source. but they are copycats. they even copy website by its design and functions exactly one by one without any notice at least to the original site. well… though.. i have no idea if it that they are copycats, also applies to those developers funded by chinese goverment. we will see. i think it is a nice try for china by the way.
I feel that if people are going to base their IT decisions based on Political governments, It is pretty childish. If that is so, Microsoft is VERY anti-democratic with it’s so-called product activation schema. Let’s not talk about WIndows Media 10. And Internet Explorer embedded within the kernel… All of This makes Kylie OS seem like a zealot of teh free world. What makes people think that the KylieOS would send democratic Info to China? It may do nothing more than Windows is doing already when it frequently calls home. I believe that any OS other than M$ or SUN is welcome in my book. I like to have a decision as to what to drop into my PCs. So I will just sit back and see what becomes of this OS. It may suprise you how far it may go.
It’s like the car industry of Japan. 30 years again, everyone was laughing their cars. Guess who’s laughing now.
Guess who’s laughing now.
The Koreans? (Hyundai, Kia, etc.) Saturn Corp.? Geo — oh, yeah, GM doesn’t have that much brains; they killed one of their better-performing subsidiaries.
I’m disappointed. Economically, politically and perhaps even technologically this is an important announcement from China; but apart from a few worthwhile comments most of the discussion has been silly and quite ignorant. Perhaps if we can’t post sensibly on this topic, the thread should be closed and we shouldn’t post at all.
> If that is so, Microsoft is VERY anti-democratic with it’s
> so-called product activation schema.
Microsoft isn’t a government for one, and product activation (either way) has nothing to do with democracy.
If this is real at all, it clearly borrows heavily from some well known BSD licensed unixlike codebase (almost certainly Darwin, given their claims of Mach kernel services). Nobody, not even the Chinese government, is going to write an OS this feature-complete from scratch and spring it on us out of the blue. Even so, this would be a big step forward for Darwin: some of the features claimed (SSI clustering, NUMA support, SELinux-like MACs) have only been available in Linux and commercial Unices until now. So let me just say, if this is real, it’s great.
Unfortunately, this seems unlikely to me. The website for this project is so unprofessional that I doubt it was produced by a team capable of creating this software. The following are strikes against them:
-The website is poorly translated, ridiculously unprofessional, makes very vague and grandiose claims, and shows only tiny screenshots that could well be KDE on Linux.
-They claim GRUB was “ported” to Kylin, yet their OS is quite obviously familiar enough that no port would be necessary: they’re using Mach, and they certainly did not invent a new filesystem.
-They claim IA64 but not PPC support, Darwin is all about PPC but does not support IA64.
-They claim not only an astounding level of feature parity with Linux, but also extraordinary compatibility – they even claim to be LSB compliant!!
Are we to believe that the Chinese government poured enough money into this project for enough time for them to achieve such an amazing result, then had someone who couldn’t do webdesign OR speak english spend 10 minutes on a website that is essentially one page of vague claims that reveal technical ignorance. A release announcment without even a download link? No way – it would be humiliating, and doesn’t reflect the level of dedication that would be required to create such software.
This is most likely vaporware, and I’d even doubt it has anything to do with the government. If we do eventually see a download, I’d bet that it’s an illegal and poorly put together Linux distribution with an OpenSSI kernel that hasn’t got a trace of Mach or BSD anywhere.
synthespian, David Adams and Eugenia are all gullible, more so, it seems, than any Slashdot editors (this story remains conspicuously absent there).
They don’t seem to like GPL
Vary Disappointed! Copycat again! Why use UNIX standard? Why not design from scatch? Waste money!
There a lot of excellent OS, such as SkyOS, ReactOS, etc. They didn’t use UNIX standard.
http://www.cas.cn/html/Dir/2004/09/27/8021.htm
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecontent?url=http…
Because than your software will not run on it and running software on it is the purpose of an OS AFAIK
“Kylin offers several programming languages,….(IDE), such as Jbuilder, QTDesign and Kylix ,etc….”
It is a linux. Kylix can run on Linux only. Difference from other program, Kylix have ‘special glibc requirements’.
But this is not a linux kernel
Anonymous, thanks for that link. Babelfish isn’t good enough for me to establish much from it, but I will now concede that this OS is probably legitimately associated with the Chinese government, and most likely will not be vaoprware. However, I’m still dubious about a true contender for most capable OS in the world (as the feature claims would make it) suddenly appearing from a Chinese government research project. I now think it’s most likely that it will be an illegal Linux distribution, in the sense that most of its code will be borrowed wholesale from Linux, and the rest from BSD and Mach. My new prediction is that it will offer nothing a Linux distro with KDE can’t now, and be distributed only in obfuscated binary form.
Just read it. It is crappy English but understandable
it costs for instance 70 million yuan (8 million dollars) and it is focused on three markets, State internetservers, telecom and the military
The quickest way to get up and running is to take a bsd license set of base code and make it into your own.
Developing an OS from scratch in 3 years to be stable and secure enough for use in government, internet and military applications probably isn’t possible.
Most, but not all, communist attempts at creating something to be competitive with more free market economies has by and large failed. The history books are full of analysis of by and large failed 5 & 10 year plans for modernization.
Of course successes include the T-34, AK-47 and early space travel…
Writting a full feature OS in some years is impossible now. All the kernel subsystems, device drivers, … need much time to test. This chinese OS is just another copy&paste clone, as they did with RedFlag. In there first RedFlag announces our chineses had boasted as if it is a new super technology OS.
IMHO, Windows is the best example of what capitalist system can produce. 😉
“Not only is [l]UNIX dead, it’s starting to smell really bad.”
— Rob Pike (circa 1991)
“new” OS with old standarts
very funny 
I’m Chinese.I think this is just a Bsd kernel with “porting” (refering to ) mang linux source(maybe a copycatish copying and stealing)and refering to many open source project
This is a shame to announce the GPL and the BSDL source as its own intelligente copyright’s ,but this China always like to do.
They have no courage to release the source for the world to check whether they indeed have the IP
and the security of defence is the best pretext
THis is just a cheating and the honor project in China.Such pjojects can cheat the government to gain many financial supporet wasting the taxpayer’s money.As China has none anti science corruption
They can do because you open source people can’t sue them and the government
In China,most people all think the open source is no copyright,and the some small companys and wildcatters can pretend to finish researched a project ,so the government will announce this is an honor and stock many these “project”,wasted much taxpayers’ money,when they find this project can’t satisfy,they must stock again.None will be sued
http://www.kylin.org.cn/english/news.htm
OSX i386 port already exist
http://www.darwin.org 
What they want to invent, may be wheel ???
It didn’t catch so much attention from chinese poeple.
The so called project just to foolish the leaders and the people.
The OS produced only for politics and security.
It will never GPLed.
If you have been the universities in china, you will know what kind of things they can do.
sure darwin is ported over, but not the osx gui. and from what i understand, that is what most users wants, they dont care about whats powering the thing as long as it looks slick…
Would you honestly trust closed source software made in China? I surely wouldn’t. They didn’t respect other people’s (C) for years, I’m sure they’re not as naive as to expect that we’ll respect their IP.
It is a linux. Kylix can run on Linux only.
I think it’s more like mixture or a “twist” of Mach, BSD, Linux with Linux compatibility layer.
http://www.kylin-linux.com.cn/
This site is chinese, too. It’s about linux. I babelfished it, its pretty linuxish, corporate. But i don’t see any other links between 2 sites besides name.
Kylin means unicorn in Chinese (atleast according to the babbledfish stories i read) so it isn’t surprising that the name is used more
For suppressing the political side of this. Two main reasons to not trust this OS its Chinese Government sponsored and China is known to copy technology and call it their own international law be damned. Think i am exagerating? recently while working a contract for an large software company, thier entire engineering departments network based in China was shutdown by the Chinese government becasue someone on that network surfed an unapproved website. THis is a valid topic for this thread.
1 – Microsoft isn’t a government and has nothing to do with politics
2 – Internet explorer is not “embedded within the kernel“
I posted a comment about this new OS and it’s possible assitance to China’s Military and it’s human rights abuses.
It may have been sarcastic but it is legit to state would anybody use an OS from a country that has documented human rights issues with it’s own populace..
Does OSNews not believe in free speech?
MrX
It may have been sarcastic but it is legit to state would anybody use an OS from a country that has documented human rights issues with it’s own populace..
Does OSNews not believe in free speech?
Very simple: It is a piece of useless information and plainly irrelevant. If you want to start a discussion about freedom of speech, how about starting with the Cisco “Great Firewall”? How comes that the first thing people are yelling around concerning an OS is politics – and that not even right?
I guess the first thing to learn here is rather to get on the point, and give competent and useful information, whether about IT or even politics. The impact of another unixish OS on freedom of speech is negligible compared e.g. to the hardware Cisco is providing. Or the international concerns about the PLA modernization is also a quite different issue.
And the gap between not-even-funny sarcasm and factual discussion is simply huge.
I can’t understand this Babelfish translation: it seems it _won’t_ be GPL compatible, right?
<cite> First is the electronic government affairs domain, this kind of user to the information security, the website guards against the aggressive request to be higher, the unicorn “the domestic product” the blood relationship has the natural competitive advantage, if completes the independent copyright the essence not the GPL rule limit, both may the nimble ground to the application development essence code, and may shield the essence module to exterior aggressor. The unicorn obeys country information system safekeeping of security rank division criterion GB 17859-1999, has achieved the structure protection level security goal, and has the strengthened user safe marking and distinction, user status credible distinction security characteristic and so on credible way, compares with other mainstream operating systems, in the information security mechanism, it may be said the unicorn outshines others.
</cite>
Can anyone make sense of the translation?
Ref:
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecontent?url=http…
It’s from the Chinese Academy of Science
http://www.cas.cn/
(I think somebody posted the original URL somewhere in this thread)
I’m a chinese
1:That system is modified from BSD.I’m sure
2:It is NOT really secure.
3:It is wasting our money
I am a chinese too.
This f*cking OS is rubbish.
It is waste of money.
i am also a chinese.
first, it seems really not GPL compatible
second, it may waste our money.
THIRD, IT IS NECESSARY! as someone said, the chinese government realise that master the core technology of the operating system is quite important, so how can you ensure that it only wastes but no effect at all? in my opinion, it is useful, it helps our experience more or less.
One Chinese company can steal the GPLd Open Source and Other OPen SOurce , then,announced it ITS own’s IP,and close the source.
Who can know whether it is their’s IP?THEY know you open source people can’t sue them.
What’s about the USA’s defence’s partment?MAYbe they do this like China ren?
Why do you think Chinese company steal? Kelin is developed at a university, which is famous in China, NOT company.
我是一个中国学生ᦁ 2;我热爱麒麟（kylin）.൲ 9;然它看起来像个小 799;科，无法和windows ,mac, linux, freebsd相比。但是谁又能 ;否认它将来不会超Ū 34;呢？现在我们还很 8590;断定麒麟的意义，& #20294;是这是我们的劳动 ;成果。请不要污蔑û 05;们的劳动。btw.那些自 ;称中国人的垃圾请ſ 81;嘴。不要诽谤中国 2290;
I am a chinese junior student.When i heared about the news that China has produced our own OS,i was really excited. i am used to use Linux.
But after i had read more info adout it,i feel disappointed.
It seems that there are no innovations!And as the website says,it has a kernel similar with MACH,system service similar to BSD,desk env similar to WIN…Then what is similar to KYLIN? What does KYLIN owns something itself?
I’m from PRC, too. (rather accustomed w/slackware&debian) They can copy a bsd-style mach and a bsd on it, then equip it with gnu tools and xfree86 and kde.
WOW! VIVE LA NOUVELLE CHINE!