With the emergence of large models and the suspension of CentOS, where will the server OS go?

Nowadays, data has become an important asset of enterprises, and the importance of the server operating system (server OS) as a "key component" to manage and process data is self-evident.

It has been nearly three years since CentOS announced the discontinuation of the service, and before that, almost all domestic enterprises will choose CentOS when choosing server OS.

Not only that, the server operating system is the basic software that the state focuses on and requires independent research and development and self-evolution during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period. The "14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Digital Economy" and other policies promulgated by the state also emphasize the importance of the localization of operating systems, and the importance and urgency of the localization of key technologies and independent innovation and development have become more and more prominent.

At the moment when the "birth" of large models is hot, the demand for computing power in various industries is becoming more and more vigorous, and even GPU chips have become "hard currency", and as a server OS that undertakes the underlying hardware and upper-layer applications, how to develop in the era of national AI can play a better connection role, which is a challenge and an opportunity for China's server OS.

In the era of large models, new requirements for server OS are required

With the advent of the era of large models, servers have changed from traditional CPUs to CPU+GPU, and even superimposed DPU, FPGA and other multi-chip chips, which also produce multiple heterogeneous computing power, and the management and invocation of these multiple heterogeneous computing power has become the key to how to make good use of computing power in enterprises.

In addition, under the rapid development of the computing industry, the data center has also changed from the traditional storage center to the computing center, and He Baohong, director of the Cloud Computing and Big Data Research Institute of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, also pointed out that the data center has changed from a simple storage capacity supply to a computing power supply. Coincidentally, Zhang Dong, vice chairman of the dragon lizard community, said that at this stage, for servers, in addition to traditional memory, non-volatile memory, storage and computing power are constantly emerging. The variety of computing power also brings great challenges to the entire computing power management.

According to the accounting of physical server shipments, the installed capacity of China's server operating system industry will reach 4.012 million sets in 2022, and the installed capacity of commercial version will reach 1.896 million sets. According to IDC and other institutions, the global server compound growth rate will be 23% in 2024. China's server market is growing even faster, with an expected growth rate of 41%, and will reach 33% of the world's total server volume in 2024, with the growth rate and market share ranking among the top in the global market.

Driven by all of the above, server OS has also entered an era of innovation, in this regard, Su Zhiyuan, general manager of the software department of Inspur information system, told Titanium Media that when it came to server OS, people always put forward the concept of "AI For System", "but now we need to consider more about 'System For AI'." Su Zhiyuan pointed out.

How to make these heterogeneous chips "run" in the server is the first condition that the server OS needs to meet, and it is also the premise of all applications.

When heterogeneous chips can "run", the next thing to consider is how to run better. In Su Zhiyuan's view, in the next era of large models, how to do a good job in CXL hierarchical memory management and optimization is a key step, "How to make memory more efficient will become a very important 'job' for server OS in the future." Su Zhiyuan emphasized.

In the process of computing power development, the construction of computing power network is an important part of it, and the ability to network also puts forward higher requirements for the new server OS. The new server OS also needs to meet the new network protocols and achieve better connectivity under the premise of high throughput and low latency. Su Zhiyuan said. Not only that, in Su Zhiyuan's view, in addition to server OS, more needs to be improved in server software capabilities for intelligent computing development scenarios, "Integrating data, tuning, and agile development capabilities has become a major challenge. Su Zhiyuan emphasized.

In this process, in order to make better and fuller use of computing resources, the server operating system needs to support a distributed system and have the ability to form a virtual supercomputer with multiple computing nodes, so as to further improve computing efficiency, and the virtualization capability has also moved from the stand-alone era to the online era.

In Zhang Dong's view, the various needs of the above-mentioned users can be summarized as: "how to provide support for the application of computing power" - this is the core problem of users, and how the operating system, as a key link in this, needs the joint efforts of the upstream and downstream of the industry.

China's open source server OS community has emerged

On the one hand, under the rapid development of the computing power industry, users have higher and higher requirements for server OS, and on the other hand, the CentOS service outage has led to the embarrassing situation that most enterprises in China have serverless OS availability and need to migrate smoothly.

According to the "Domestic Server OS Development Report" released by the Open Data Center Council (ODCC), only 8% of users are willing to stay in the CentOS system, while 72% of users are willing, and are planning and piloting to switch to domestic server OS, and more than half of them hope to complete this transition within one year.

Under the influence of the above two factors, China's server OS has entered a new stage, and the ecological and community-based model with open source as the core concept has gradually developed in China. In this regard, Zhang Dong said that with the development of the digital industry, many emerging chip and application manufacturers have emerged in China, and users' demand for operating systems is becoming more and more vigorous, but "fighting separately" will eventually lead to slow development, "At this time, we need to 'huddle together for warmth'," Zhang Dong pointed out, "By building a community, everyone can work together to solve the problems they face, and at the same time promote the development of the open source community." ”

It is worth noting that among the few server OS open source communities, the Dragon Lizard Operating System Open Source Community (OpenAnolis) and the Euler Operating System Open Source Community (OpenEuler) have relatively complete ecological construction.

Ma Tao, chairman of the dragon lizard community and vice president of Alibaba Cloud's basic software department, told Titanium Media that China's open source community formally has the governance structure of foreign open source communities, but it is constantly innovating in terms of operation model, which is very different from foreign communities, "For example, in terms of community contributions, China's open source community mainly comes from the initiator of the project, and the open source project is also more oriented to commercial interests," Ma Tao pointed out. " China's model is more efficient, which can greatly shorten the time from initiation to commercialization, and the community atmosphere is more dynamic and innovative under the leadership of many leading companies in the community and individual developers with open source feelings. ”

At present, in terms of market, technology, and ecology, the dragon lizard open source community and the Euler open source community have formed a development trend that goes hand in hand, and each has a very clear business ecological model, the "inheritance + innovation" path of the dragon lizard open source community and the "revolution + reconstruction" path of the Euler open source community complement each other, work together to cope with the impact of CentOS service suspension, keep up with the update and iteration of the technology wave, and practice the multi-route development direction of the open source ecology of the server operating system.

At the same time, Titanium Media noticed that diversity is also a major advantage of China's server OS open source community. Most foreign communities such as Red Hat, Fedora, and CentOS Stream are led by a single vendor, and once the vendor "stops playing", community operation will face great problems. In contrast, China's open source community is more diversified, and many upstream and downstream manufacturers in the industry are involved in the community, and the "contribution" determines the "status" in the community, even if a manufacturer withdraws from the community, the community can still run stably, "This model is responsible for the community, and it is also responsible for the majority of users and developers." Ma Tao said.

The road is long and the line is coming

Of course, the development of the server OS open source community in China is still in its early stages, and there is still a certain gap with the international server operation market. It is understood that at this stage, China's server operating system market is still dominated by overseas manufacturers, but the attention of various industries to China's server operating system is increasing year by year, and the degree of choice is also showing a trend of increasing year by year, according to statistics, up to now, the cumulative installed capacity of ORA exceeds 6.1 million sets, and at present, there are more than 800 partners in the dragon lizard community, and the installed capacity has exceeded 6 million.

According to the "Domestic Server Operating System Development Report", in recent years, the performance level of domestic operating systems has been steadily improved, and at this stage, it has been able to meet the needs of about 75% of scenarios, and the competitiveness of domestic products is getting higher and higher.

When talking about China's operating system, Ma Tao and Zhang Dong both said that users still have some concerns about stability and reliability, "Long-term stability is the most concerned issue for users in the process of migrating to a domestic operating system." Zhang Dong pointed out, "Whether the operating system is compatible with the boards, machines and other hardware of different manufacturers, and whether it can operate safely and stably for a long time, in fact, OpenAnolis still has certain advantages in the server OS open source community in this regard." ”

Indeed, as Zhang Dong said, it is not difficult to see that the Chinese server OS open source community has obvious advantages in this regard.

The important members of the dragon lizard community include many leading enterprises in related industries, such as Alibaba Cloud, Inspur Information, Intel, etc. Intel does not need to go into details, and Alibaba Cloud, as a leading enterprise in the field of cloud computing in China, has rich application scenarios, and can provide rich application scenarios in the process of "tuning" the domestic operating system. Looking at Inspur Information, as the world's No. 1 server supplier in terms of AI server shipments, it has rich experience in hardware optimization, especially in the field of AI, this cloud + AI model allows the dragon lizard community to have almost all the elements of the current demand for operating systems.

On the other hand, the openEuler community, which is similar to the dragon lizard community, has also brought together China's top digital technology companies represented by Huawei through the integration of resources, and the two open source communities are enough to support the many needs of Chinese enterprises in choosing server OS.

With the development of the server OS open source community, China's operating system has begun to be slowly accepted by domestic enterprises, according to the recent survey of the Academy of Information and Communications Technology for user groups, the dragon lizard operating system has become the first place in the user's willingness to migrate with a proportion of 53%, at the same time, according to the survey, at present, including the Internet, government, finance, medical, telecommunications, manufacturing, etc., many industries have a positive attitude towards migrating to China's operating system.

However, there are still some gaps between China's operating system and the international top level, Ma Tao said that a truly excellent operating system needs to meet three major conditions, namely: higher stability, larger ecosystem, and a wider range of applications, "At present, China's operating system also needs to make China's operating system better and better through technological innovation, joint upstream and downstream enterprises in more industries, and more application promotion," Ma Tao emphasized.

With the rapid development of the AI industry represented by large models, more and higher requirements will be put forward for server operating systems that are connected to applications and hardware infrastructure in the future. In the future, only by jointly promoting the open source development of China's operating system can the upstream and downstream of the industry "stay warm" and jointly promote the development of China's operating system, can we better release the value of computing power and empower the development of the AI industry.

(This article was first published in Titanium Media APP, author|Zhang Shenyu)