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.

Geared for IoT and cloud infrastructure, openEuler (https://openeuler.org/en/) 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 50 contributors and 600 commits. The openEuler repositories include two new projects: iSulad, a lightweight container run-time daemon created specifically for IoT and the cloud (https://gitee.com/openeuler/iSulad), and A-Tune, an OS-tuning software (https://gitee.com/openeuler/A-Tune).

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 openEuler's source code has been made available and can be found on Gitee (https://gitee.com/openeuler).

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 (https://openeuler.org/en/developer.html).

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

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