Unfortunately it seems to be a completely proprietary kernel. I did find a paper on it (presented by Huawei in a conference): https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-haibo

The first line of the abstract reads

This paper presents the design and implementation of HongMeng kernel (HM), a commercialized general-purpose microkernel that preserves most of the virtues of microkernels while addressing the above challenges.

Another interesting tidbit from the paper:

We started the HongMeng kernel (HM) project over 7 years ago to re-examine and retrofit the microkernel into a general OS kernel for emerging scenarios. To be practical for production deployment, HM achieves full Linux API/ABI compatibility and is capable of reusing the Linux applications and driver ecosystems such that it can run complex frameworks like AOSP [42] and OpenHarmony [35] with rich peripherals.

thats a very fair point, I had not seen anyone else make this one But the problem is that in this case, this functionality was entirely undocumented. I dont think it was intended for programmers.

Now if the firmware was open source, people would have gotten to know about this much sooner even if not documented. Also such functionality should ideally be gated somehow through some auth mechanism.

Also just like how the linux kernel allows decades old devices to be at the very least patched for security risks, open firmware would allow users of this chip to patch it themselves for bugs, security issues.

It was a skin, now its a completely different OS. The initial version, HarmonyOS, was based on Android/Linux, the new HarmonyOS Next, is a proprietary version (or successor) of HarmonyOS based on an open source project/OS, OpenHarmony. It uses a new microkernel instead of the linux kernel.

OpenHarmony is essentially an open source base for making an operating system on top. Its not like the Linux kernel, in the sense that its not just a kernel (in fact you can use the linux kernel with it), but rather a bunch of components people can build upon. And since it uses a permissive license, you can build a proprietary OS on top of it (like the HarmonyOS Next).

Huawei actually launched OpenHarmony many years back but it was not ready for phone usage yet. It was only with the launch of the 5th version that Huawei was confident enough in it to start using it on their own phones.

Its really a shame Huawei went for a closed source OS on phones (and probably laptops in the future if not now) instead of Linux or another open source OS (they even started with an open source version of their os). I hope this harmony os doesn’t take up in other countries or we would be going backwards.

So the data of the 24 people, who signed for the beta program, were accessible to each other, to all the 24 people? Sounds like nothing burger to me. The odds of someone in the 24 people knowing about this issue beforehand I would say are pretty low.

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We really should be pushing for fully open source stack (firmware, os) in all iot devices. They are not very complicated so this should be entirely possible. Probably will need a EU law though.

I saw a comment somewhere that to exploit this a person has to be physically in the area (i think it was in a radius of few meters iirc). Thats not much better i guess since its not hard to be around random iot devices but it at least prevents mass attacks (if true).

aha thanks! i was wondering how ppl do this yeah but tbf discord has a lot of features

depending on which client you use, the ui can be very discord-like (this is cinny): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cinnyapp/cinny-site/main/assets/preview2-light.png

Also matrix has calls (at least element does), though not sure about screen share. And since when was discord e2e?

I ll admit matrix was for a long time really slow but matrix 2.0 largely solves this and other usability issues. Calls and screen share are still not standardized but its all being worked on.

With matrix, its not just about building one app, its about building a decentralized ecosystem all connected by the matrix protocol. So things tend to take more time.

but it can look similar to discord: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cinnyapp/cinny-site/main/assets/preview2-light.png

why dont you make something like r/SubredditSimulator? It would be cool to see what modern llms can do in this respect.

rpm-ostree is intended to be the last resort because layering causes issues with updates and other things

AMD and Intel both have very good linux support. On that note there shouldn’t be much of a difference.

In fact, AMD GPU drivers are quite a bit ahead of Intel on Linux. And the AMD laptop has a significantly more powerful iGPU plus it has DDR5 ram. So it should give you noticeably better performance.

More problematic could be the wifi chip, fingerprint reader and maybe the camera.

Wifi nowadays works well on Linux so I don’t think that should be much of a problem. Intel Wifi usually has better support though.

Cameras also mostly work though the IR sensor might not work.

Fingerprint support on linux is 50/50 (from linux-hardware, it seems fingerprint on similar models is not working unfortunately). If you know the exact fingerprint reader model on the laptop you can check if it has linux support.

Thinkpads usually have good support on Linux overall so I won’t be too worried with either option. I couldn’t find the exact models on linux-hardware.org, however I did find similar models:

All AMD models by this name (E14 Gen 6)

All Intel models by this name (E14 Gen 5)

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