Kylin () is an

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

developed by academics at the

National University of Defense Technology The National University of Defense Technology (NUDT; ) is a national public research university headquartered in Kaifu, Changsha, Hunan, China. It is affiliated with the Central Military Commission. The university is part of Project 211, ...

in the

People's Republic of China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

since 2001. It is named after the mythical beast ''

qilin The qilin ( ; ) is a legendary hooved chimerical creature that appears in Chinese mythology, and is said to appear with the imminent arrival or death of a sage or illustrious ruler. Qilin are a specific type of the mythological family of o ...

''. The first versions were based on

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

and were intended for use by the Chinese military and other government organizations. With version 3.0, Kylin became

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

-based, and there is a version called NeoKylin which was announced in 2010. By 2019, the NeoKylin variant is compatible with more than 4,000 software and hardware products, and it ships pre-installed on most computers sold in China. Together, Kylin and Neokylin have 90% market share of the government sector. A separate project using

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical (company), Canonical and a community of contributors under a Meritocracy, meritocratic gover ...

as the base Linux operating system was announced in 2013. The first version of

Ubuntu Kylin Ubuntu Kylin () is the official Chinese version of the Ubuntu computer operating system. It is intended for desktop and laptop computers, and has been described as a "loose continuation of the Chinese Kylin OS". In 2013, Canonical Ltd. reached ...

was released in April 2013. In August 2020, v10 of Kylin OS was launched. It is compatible with 10,000 hardware and software products, and it "supports

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

's Android

ecosystem An ecosystem (or ecological system) is a system formed by Organism, organisms in interaction with their Biophysical environment, environment. The Biotic material, biotic and abiotic components are linked together through nutrient cycles and en ...

". In July 2022, an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

version of Kylin, titled openKylin was released.

FreeBSD version

Development of Kylin began in 2001, when the

was assigned the mission of developing an operating system under the

863 Program The 863 program () or State High-Tech Development Plan () was a program funded and administered by the government of the People's Republic of China intended to stimulate the development of advanced technologies in a wide range of fields for th ...

intended to make China independent of foreign technology. The aim was "to support several kinds of server platforms, to achieve high performance, high availability and high security, as well as conforming to international standards of

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

and

operating systems". It was created using a hierarchy model, including "the basic

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learnin ...

layer which is similar to

Mach The Mach number (M or Ma), often only Mach, (; ) is a dimensionless quantity in fluid dynamics representing the ratio of flow velocity past a Boundary (thermodynamic), boundary to the local speed of sound. It is named after the Austrian physi ...

, the system service layer which is similar to

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...

and the

desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphi ...

which is similar to

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

". It was designed to comply with the UNIX standards and to be compatible with Linux applications. In February 2006, "China Military Online" (a website sponsored by

PLA Daily The ''People's Liberation Army Daily'' (), or ''PLA Daily'' for short, is the official newspaper of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA). Institutionally, the ''PLA Daily'' is the mouthpiece of and speaks for the Central Military Commission ( ...

of the

Chinese People's Liberation Army The People's Liberation Army (PLA) is the military of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People's Republic of China (PRC). It consists of four Military branch, services—People's Liberation Army Ground Force, Ground Force, People's ...

) reported the "successful development of the Kylin server operating system", which it said was "the first

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing units (CPU) and arithmetic logic units (ALU) are those that are based on processor registers, a ...

operating system with high security level ( B2 class)" and "also the first operating system without

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

that has obtained Linux global standard authentification by the international Free Standards Group". In April 2006, it was said that the Kylin operating system was largely based on

5.3. An anonymous Chinese student in Australia, who used the pseudonym "Dancefire", carried out a kernel similarity analysis and showed that the similarities between the two operating systems reached 99.45 percent. One of Kylin's developers confirmed that Kylin was based on FreeBSD during a speech at the international conference EuroBSDCon 2006. In 2009, a report presented to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission stated that the purpose of Kylin is to make Chinese computers impenetrable to competing countries in the

cyberwarfare Cyberwarfare is the use of cyberattack, cyber attacks against an enemy State (polity), state, causing comparable harm to actual warfare and/or disrupting vital computer systems. Some intended outcomes could be espionage, sabotage, propaganda, ...

arena. The ''

Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...

'' reported that:

China has developed more secure operating software for its tens of millions of computers and is already installing it on government and military systems, hoping to make
Beijing Beijing, Chinese postal romanization, previously romanized as Peking, is the capital city of China. With more than 22 million residents, it is the world's List of national capitals by population, most populous national capital city as well as ...
’s networks impenetrable to U.S. military and intelligence agencies.

The deployment of Kylin was said to have "hardened key Chinese servers".

Kylin Linux (NeoKylin)

With the advent of version 3.0, Kylin has used the Linux kernel. In December 2010, it was announced that China Standard Software and the

had signed a strategic partnership to launch a version called NeoKylin. China Standard Software is the maker of the "NeoShine Linux" desktop series. NeoKylin is intended for use by government offices, national defense, energy and other sectors of the Chinese economy. In 2014,

Bloomberg News Bloomberg News (originally Bloomberg Business News) is an international news agency headquartered in New York City and a division of Bloomberg L.P. Content produced by Bloomberg News is disseminated through Bloomberg Terminals, Bloomberg T ...

reported that the northeastern city of Siping had migrated its computers from Microsoft Windows to NeoKylin, as part of a government effort to shift computer technology to Chinese suppliers. In September 2015, US computer maker

Dell Dell Inc. is an American technology company that develops, sells, repairs, and supports personal computers (PCs), Server (computing), servers, data storage devices, network switches, software, computer peripherals including printers and webcam ...

reported that 42% of personal computers they sold in China were now running NeoKylin. The operating system of the

Tianhe-1 Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 (, ; '' Sky River Number One'') is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax (maximum range) of 2.5 peta FLOPS. Located at the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, China, it was the fastest computer in the world fr ...

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

is 64-bit Kylin Linux, which is oriented to high-performance

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computing, computation in which many calculations or Process (computing), processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. ...

optimization, and supports

power management Power management is a feature of some electrical appliances, especially copiers, computers, computer CPUs, computer GPUs and computer peripherals such as monitors and printers, that turns off the power or switches the system to a low-power ...

and high-performance virtual computing. The newer

Tianhe-2 Tianhe-2 or TH-2 (, i.e. 'Milky Way 2') is a 33.86- petaflop supercomputer located in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers. It was the world's fastest supercomputer ...

also uses Kylin Linux.

Ubuntu Kylin

In 2013,

Canonical The adjective canonical is applied in many contexts to mean 'according to the canon' the standard, rule or primary source that is accepted as authoritative for the body of knowledge or literature in that context. In mathematics, ''canonical exampl ...

reached an agreement with the

Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People's Republic of China The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) is the sixth-ranked executive department of the State Council of the People's Republic of China. It is responsible for regulation and development of the postal service, Internet, wireles ...

to release an

-based Linux OS with features targeted at the Chinese market."Chinese government builds national OS around Ubuntu."
ZDNet, 22 March 2013 Ubuntu Kylin has been described as "a loose continuation of China's Kylin OS".Chinese Linux Distro Seeks Place in Ubuntu Family
www.omgubuntu.co.uk, 27 February 2013. Retrieved 29 April 2013 It is intended for desktop and laptop computers.China to create home-grown operating system
BBC News, 22 March 2013 The first official release, Ubuntu Kylin 13.04, was on 25 April 2013.The Final Release of Ubuntu Kylin 13.04 Is Now Available for Download
news.softpedia.com, retrieved 26 April 2013

References

External links

Kylin Official Website
(Chinese)
What is Kylin
Project Mission Statement, September 2004, at the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

(English)
Official Kylin website
April 2006, on the

(Chinese)
NeoKylin
(Chinese)

{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130612183410/http://www.cassc.org.cn/english/product_of_kylin.htm , date=12 June 2013 at China Aid Software Service Center (English)
openKylin Official Website
Chinese-language Linux distributions Computing platforms FreeBSD Linux distributions State-sponsored Linux distributions Supercomputing in China Unix variants

FreeBSD version

Kylin Linux (NeoKylin)

Ubuntu Kylin

See also

References

External links