OpenEuler: An Emerging OS Community in China

### Overview Presented at Open Source Summit North America, this session introduces openEuler, an open-source operating system community originating in China. Presenters Zheng Zhenyu and Zhongjun outline how the project addresses core operating system challenges brought by diverse computing architectures, diverging server vs. embedded ecosystems, and kernel maintenance complexity. The talk details openEuler's release model, technical innovations, and the large-scale cloud-native infrastructure that powers community development.

### Key Topics - **Community Evolution**: Founded in 2019, established its Community Committee in 2020, and transferred to the OpenAtom Foundation in 2021. The community has seen a 4x increase in contributors, a 30x increase in downloads, and over 800 community partners spanning processors, servers, and databases. - **Bridging the Architectural & Ecosystem Gap**: Addressing fragmentation between server distributions and embedded/IoT platforms (e.g., Yocto, Wind River) through unified codebases and standardized toolchains. - **Release Strategy**: A predictable cadence pairing twice-a-year Innovation releases (March and September) with Long-Term Support (LTS) releases every two years that are maintained for six years. - **Community Infrastructure & Tooling**: Utilizing upstream open-source tools alongside custom implementations to manage large-scale continuous integration, code review, containerization, and package signing.

### Technical Details - **Kernel and Core Innovations**: LTS 22.03 is built on Linux kernel 5.10 with architectural optimizations for large-scale ARM clusters, user-mode protocol stacks, and HCK decoupled control yielding 5% to 20% performance gains. In-house sub-projects include **iSula** (a lightweight container runtime with low overhead integrated into the CNCF landscape), **StratoVirt** (virtualization platform), **A-Tune** (AI-assisted cluster service tuning), and **A-Ops** (AI-driven cluster operations including security scanning, monitoring, and live patching). - **Kernel-as-a-Service (KaaS)**: To combat Linux kernel tightly-coupled maintenance challenges across massive machine fleets facing frequent CVEs, openEuler proposes KaaS. This framework redesigns driver isolation and utilizes eBPF to make networking, storage, and scheduling reconfigurable and flexible without full kernel recompilation. - **Tenon-and-Mortise Architecture**: Inspired by traditional Chinese interlocking woodwork, openEuler is built as a composable OS. Using a unified core base structure and the **EulerMaker** build toolchain, custom OS instances can be assembled for diverse targets from data center servers to embedded devices. - **Infrastructure Engineering**: The infrastructure leverages OBS (Open Build Service), GNU Mailman, NGINX Ingress, Argo CD, HashiCorp Vault, and Kubernetes. To run reliably in-house, the team created **Robot** (an evolved replacement for CNCF Prow where individual plugins run in isolated containers to prevent single-plugin crashes from restarting the entire engine) and **signatrust** (an optimized, cloud-native package signing solution based on OBS sign).

### Takeaways openEuler positions itself beyond a simple Linux distribution as a modular, composable operating system platform built for diversified computing. By incorporating AI-driven operations, eBPF-based kernel service isolation, and automated cloud-native community infrastructure, the community aims to provide a unified foundation spanning both server and embedded environments.