OpenCloudOS: China’s First Fully Domestic Server OS – Why It Matters

Chinese operating system companies are transitioning from open‑source users to contributors and even technology leaders.

Recently, the domestically developed open‑source operating system OpenCloudOS officially released its first source‑community (L1) version and the first full‑package (L3) version, and disclosed its technical development roadmap.

OpenCloudOS will become China’s first server OS with a complete domestic supply chain, providing an upstream version that is controllable and meeting enterprise‑grade stability requirements.

The L1 source‑community version does not depend on any commercial or community distributions. Its kernel and user‑space software come from the latest stable upstream releases, featuring innovation, cost‑effectiveness, security, trustworthiness, and ease of use.

The L3 full‑package version includes over 2,000 software packages, supports graphical deployment, and is heavily customized; the kernel is an optimized 5.4 LTS version; user‑space is fully compatible with RHEL 8, with upgraded core components, supporting x86_64 and arm64 architectures.

The Linux operating system supply chain is likened to a river, where L1 is the upstream source, L2 the downstream enterprise‑stable version, and L3 the downstream derivative used for community redistribution.

OpenCloudOS is positioned as a neutral, open, secure, stable, high‑performance Linux server OS.

In December of last year, the OpenCloudOS community was founded by major domestic OS, hardware vendors and individual developers to build such an OS.

Tencent, with over ten years of OS experience, contributes its own server OS kernel TencentOS Server and IoT OS TencentOS Tiny, both open‑sourced in 2019 and 2020.

So far, 47 well‑known enterprises and institutions have joined the community, spanning hardware manufacturers, chip makers, service providers, carriers, and covering the entire OS ecosystem.

According to statistics, the OpenCloudOS community and its derivative versions have been installed on more than 10 million machines across 12 major industries such as banking, insurance, and securities.

The diverse and long‑term technical roadmap of OpenCloudOS is expected to grow under the wave of open‑source collaboration.