Beijing issues list of approved CPUs – with no Intel or AMD AMD and Intel are not present on a list of processors approved by China's Information Security Evaluation Center. A December 26, 2023 document lists 18 CPUs Beijing has signed off as suitable for use by locals. The x86 architecture does make the list, but only in chips made by Shanghai Zhaoxin Integrated Circuit Co., Ltd – …
And in ARM and x86 hardware, that's essentially Western IP.
On the matter of Linux it's quite remarkable isn't it, that a 22 year Finn was able to (with a bit of assistance, and inspiration from the closed Unix system) able to write a complete new operating system. And the entire technological and innovative might of both China and Russia has failed to come up with any killer new OS, and merely been to stick a red flag on Linux (and fill it with government spyware).
Yes, Linus is one of those extremely rare individuals capable of such an endeavor and the great loto of the universal birthing made him popup in Finland.
If he had been born in China or Russia we would probably never have seen Linux come to light ( at least nor in the same manner).
While Linus has indeed pulled off a great feat writing the Linux kernel from scratch, don't forget there is also the GNU tools from the free software foundation plus millions of other lines of code for other applications coded by lots of different developers from all over the world that go into making Linux distros.
And China could have chosen an alternative to Linux for their home grown OS, either writing it from scratch or adapting something like BSD which tech companies such as Sony did for the PlayStation OS and Apple did with MacOS. But why reinvent the wheel when Linux already existing and has the widest install and user base and its license allows for it to be forked. It maybe not popular on the desktop but with everything else it dominates. Running everywhere from high end supercomputers all the way down to tiny embedded devices. so i would have said it would be been the logical choice for adapting for a 'home grown' OS.
《While Linus has indeed pulled off a great feat writing the Linux kernel from scratch, don't forget there is also the GNU tools from the free software foundation plus millions of other lines of code for other applications coded by lots of different developers from all over the world that go into making Linux distros.》
Might also help to remember that the target was a lot smaller. Back then (as I was:) you could buy a copy of Andrew Tanenbaum's Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (1987) (as I did;)) and see the listing of a complete multitasking kernel that was possible in 12k lines and for the fairly grubby pre i386 processors (8086 and later 80286.) The i386 with its flat memory model was a lot closer to a traditional Unix architecture.
AFAIK apart from an early use of the minix file system Linus used nothing else from the minix kernel. I would also guess that much of the original kernel development was using a gnu cross development toolchain on a SunOS 4.x workstation (the most common platform within Unis at the time.)
Virtually nothing in this world pops out of the void ex nihilo ad nihilum but is built on the work of and from the inspiration by those that preceeded us.
Today the incredible quantity and unimaginable variety of computing hardware means developing a reasonably useful general purpose kernel completely from scratch is probably very close to an impossible task for an individual. No accident that even in the IOT/embedded space which is a very much smaller target, Linux appears to dominate (safety critical and real time systems probably excepted.)
"On the matter of Linux it's quite remarkable isn't it, that a 22 year Finn was able to (with a bit of assistance, and inspiration from the closed Unix system) able to write a complete new operating system. "
He wrote a kernel to boot the machine, the operating system was mostly Richard Stallmans doing. Without the GNU tools and utilities he wrote as part of the GNU effort Linus would have had nothing to boot his kernel with or even make it to start with. Oh and that would have been Minix that was his inspiration that itself was inspired by the unix. Just like Stallman being pissed off at password being required change to log into the Unix systems he worked with inspired him to replace them with freedom based tools released under the GNU foundations efforts.
Without the GNU tools and utilities he wrote as part of the GNU effort Linus would have had nothing to boot his kernel with or even make it to start with.
Instead of GNU, Linus could easily have used the open source 4.4BSD-Lite userland.
> Instead of GNU, Linus could easily have used the open source 4.4BSD-Lite userland.
IIRC that did not include a usable C compiler targeting 386. The PC BSD versions have always used GNU C, except for shifting towards LLVM in recent years.
The development tools used for 386BSD (which was the first free BSD on the PC) is described here: https://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/porting-unix-to-the-386-language-tools-c/184408529
Writing an operating system is never a trivial endeavour, but it's only moderately rare rather than truly remarkable.
What's remarkable is not writing an OS, it's gathering the surrounding infrastructure. At the time Linux became vaguely usable for a clued up end user, NetBSD and FreeBSD were close to release, 32 bit OS/2 was out, and Windows NT was also near. NeXTStep was already out, and would be shortly available for i386 - it'd have minimal impact until the turn of the century when Apple adopted it in the form of OS X for their PowerPC systems. BeOS, WebOS and others would also come and go.
It's also true that what was expected from an operating system in 1992 was radically different to that in 2002, or in indeed 2022. In 1992 you could get away with releasing a consumer OS without built in networking! Now, if your operating system doesn't include widevine to play DRM content from streaming providers, most people won't touch it. 3D cards didn't exist in the consumer space in 1992, now they're a necessity just to get Wayland running.
Linus continues to be an excellent shepherd of the product, but did get a large leg up from the existence of GNU and XFree86. Whatever the faults of X, a lot of credit is also due to the large commercial companies that sponsored its development.
The key concept isn't 'western technology' so much as 'open source technology'.
When I boot up Windows Heaven only knows what its doing and why. This is not acceptable for a technology that's important for a company or a society. I put up with it because I don't have the resources to deal with it and, more often than not, the use of Windows is mandated by my employer. If I had the resources, though, I'd only use a platform that I know and trust (and didn't need to phone home all the time to do this).
Its the same with hardware. Making things more complicated rarely makes them better, its just a logical version of sticking fingers in a leaky dike.
I guess that the doable thing at this point is to migrate software to Linux, and retain as much hardware as possible, until more performant homemade hardware becomes available.
There's some consumer-level RISC-V kit available, although I concede that it's not very powerful. Shandong university already has a RISC-V server too... The RISC-V Sophgo SG2380 chip ought to be available in the second half of this year - a much more powerful processor.
My guess though, is that this is (once again) an overly ambitious target : I realise that China is the biggest producer of electronics in the world, but reports suggest that they haven't got the capacity to fab the quantity of chips that this initiative requires.
The Financial Times report also says that China accounts for 23% of Intel's business - they're going to take a hit.
Actually very few people would need to know about actual details, it's the middle man that has all the cards.
And that middle man is usually an "independent contractor", in truth under the companies umbrella and over whom they retain complete deniability.
> Consumers are not affected
TFA only explicitly mentions "Chinese orgs" and "businesses", doesn't claim that consumers are affected (doesn't explicitly rule them out, either).
> Gamers Nexus can get this right so why can't El Reg?
'Cos the great appeal of El Reg is the chance to be smug in the comments?
"Beijing’s procurement revamp is part of a national strategy for technological autarky in the military, government and state sectors that has become known as xinchuang or “IT application innovation”.
"State-owned enterprises were similarly told by their overseer, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, to complete a technology transition to domestic providers by 2027."
The suggested cost is $91bn...a hefty amount of hardware.
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The FT chatted to some IT shops inside China and they confirmed that they're phasing out items like PCs running Windows, because shop-at-home mandates have taken force.
This is the most concerning news; just think what the Chinese will be able to do once unshackled from the disastrous security vulnerabilities and constant pointless change for the sake of change which Microsoft operating systems inflict on us in the west.
Microsoft are probably looking at this and panicking. I imagine they're looking at a RISC-V version of Windows right now. Because I'd say it represents a threat to their business worldwide - if China transitions to Linux, that ups the bar for everyone else.
I can imagine the conversations in boardrooms now: "Why are China so much cheaper?" "They use Linux and open source, not Microsoft" "Then why aren't we doing that?"
(The icon I need is probably somewhere between "hmm" and "wild speculation", so I'll play it safe and go with this one)
I don't think that will be the conversation. Windows licenses are pretty cheap. It will take a lot of changes before that answer is anything along the lines of the real one:
"Why are China so much cheaper?" "They can pay people really low and work them for 72 hours a week on normal weeks. Ah, can we do that too? Maybe open up a Chinese office and do work there? What other countries can we do that in?"
Not a chance. They’ve been struggling with Windows-on-ARM for about a decade and a half without success, the last thing they need is yet another Windows-porting money hole.
Accept the fact: Windows was always an x86-only system, still is, and always will be.
Well past time for the rest of us in this world to tell the Chinese to stick their garbage where the sun don't shine. See how well they like a few hundred million of their slave laborers unemployed. I know I have, I am very selective where my money gets spent, unless their is no other option they will never get another cent of my money as long as I live. Same goes with the parasite corporations that do their business there too, I speak with my dollars for all of it, enough of them too...
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