The Eclipse Foundation has announced a new working group and top-level project to develop an open source operating system to run on IoT and edge systems.

The Oniro operating system will be a transparent, vendor-neutral, and independent OS for the next generation of distributed systems, according to the foundation.

In practical terms, Oniro will be based on HarmonyOS, the distributed multi-kernel operating system developed by Huawei. This was made open source earlier this year as OpenHarmony open source project and donated to Open Atom, China’s new open source foundation.

The Oniro OS will be able to run on more devices than current operating systems because it features a multi-kernel architecture. Specifically, it has a Linux Yocto kernel that means the OS to run on larger embedded devices, such as Raspberry Pi-class devices. It also has a Zephyr kernel that means the OS can run on highly resource-constrained devices. The examples given are a coffee maker or a thermostat.

Describing the new operating system, Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said that:

"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."

He said that Oniro OS will offer a more seamless experience than is the case with the current generation of operating systems. Part of this would be the ability for devices to directly connect to one another and share data. Data exchanged between devices will be able to 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.

Milinkovich says he expects 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.

Developers interested in getting involved are invited to subscribe to the Oniro working group list. 

More Information

Oniro Working Group

Oniro Project

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