Huawei Releases CentOS-Based openEuler as Open Source

With the US ban on Huawei, the company has opted to focus some of their efforts on their own server solution. To prevent a continued dependence on US software, the Chinese company has released an open source version of EulerOS, a server platform based on CentOS.

OpenEuler is geared for IoT and Cloud infrastructure. OpenEuler has been released for ARM64 architecture and is compatible with the Open Containers Initiative (OCI). Huawei claims it has made changes to CentOS to give it a performance boost and reliability.

OpenEuler currently has more than fifty contributors and 600 commits. The OpenEuler repositories include two new projects: iSulad (a lightweight container runtime daemon created specifically for IoT and Cloud) and A-Tune (an OS tuning software).

At the moment there is very little information about OpenEuler, and the only documentation to be found has yet to be translated to English. However the source code for OpenEuler has been made available and can be found on Gitee.

The official mission of OpenEuler states “Through community contributions, openEuler builds an innovative platform and a unified and open OS that supports the multi-processor architecture, and promotes the robustness of the software and hardware application ecosystem.” 

Anyone wishing to contribute to the project can read up on the process in the Contributions to the Community documentation.

Huawei also claims that OpenEuler is one of the most secure operating systems available by offering:

• Configurable hardening policies.
• Kernel-level OS security capabilities.
• Passed the certification of China's Ministry of Public Security operating system information security technology.
• Passed the CC EAL4+ certification with the German BSI PP standard.
• Passed the CC EAL2+ certification with the US NIAP PP standard.
• Certified by the US NIST CAVP cryptographic algorithm.
• Support Nessus security leak detection tool.
• Support NSFOCUS RSAS security leak detection tool.