How Is Cloud‑Native Transforming Linux OSes? Inside Anolis OS and eBPF

In the past year, two major OS events stood out: Red Hat’s unilateral decision to end support for CentOS 8 in 2021 and the establishment of the eBPF Foundation, both influencing the global operating‑system ecosystem.

InfoQ interviewed Ma Tao, co‑founder of Alibaba’s kernel team and co‑chair of the DIVE Global Basic Software Innovation Conference 2021, to discuss notable OS changes in the cloud‑native era.

CentOS 8 End‑of‑Life: What Can Be Done?

Red Hat announced in December that CentOS 8 would be discontinued at the end of 2021, prompting OS vendors and developers to address the migration risks faced by users.

CentOS historically dominated the market, with a 39% share in 2018, rising to 40% in 2019, but dropping to 28% by 2020 as Ubuntu gained ground.

Although the shutdown does not cause an immediate crash, it raises significant security concerns, making migration a priority; Ma Tao, with over a decade of OS experience, decided to act.

Anolis OS: Dual Kernel, Full Compatibility

After ten years developing internal operating systems at Alibaba, the team launched the OpenAnolis community in 2020, releasing Anolis OS with a dual‑kernel solution (RHCK and ANCK) to offer users a choice between legacy stability and innovative features.

Anolis OS aims for complete compatibility with the CentOS ecosystem, providing a reliable migration path and demonstrating the community’s technical strength through compatibility specifications and testing tools.

The RHCK kernel aligns with the CentOS 8 kernel and receives synchronized updates, while the ANCK kernel introduces new capabilities, giving users a “double promise” of stability and innovation.

The OpenAnolis community is organized with a council, technical committee, operations committee, and numerous SIGs open to global developers.

Increasingly, ecosystem partners—including OS vendors, chip makers, and cloud providers—join the community to build native open‑source OS distributions that support multiple hardware architectures and offer alternatives to CentOS.

In the cloud‑native era, operating systems must evolve; the community sees cloud‑native trends as a crucial driver for long‑term sustainability.

What Makes Domestic OS Different in the Cloud‑Native Era?

Early virtualization technologies (VMware, Xen) introduced resource abstraction but did not constitute true cloud‑native computing.

The advent of containers in 2013, driven by Docker and later Kubernetes, shifted the focus to OS‑level virtualization (cgroups, namespaces), making containers the primary unit for cloud workloads.

While containers are central to CNCF’s definition of cloud‑native, traditional OSes have not been “born of the cloud” and lack revolutionary innovations.

Container security challenges prompted Alibaba Cloud to develop a lightweight virtualization and application‑kernel technology, creating a secure sandbox container that retains full container functionality.

This sandbox enables secure isolation without sacrificing the container ecosystem, representing a cloud‑native OS evolution.

Looking ahead to the Serverless era, a completely new cloud‑native operating system is needed to provide efficient, innovative services for cloud platforms and applications.

Talent shortages remain a challenge for domestic OS development; eBPF can lower the barrier for kernel development, allowing developers to focus on higher‑value work.

Why Is eBPF Suddenly Hot?

On August 12 2021, major tech companies announced the formation of the eBPF Foundation under the Linux Foundation to accelerate eBPF’s open‑source growth.

eBPF makes the Linux kernel programmable, reducing the time to contribute kernel features from months to weeks, dramatically speeding up development cycles.

This reflects the continuous evolution of the Linux community, which remains vibrant after three decades.

Despite progress, many still perceive domestic OS projects as niche, often overlooking the collaborative work happening in communities like OpenAnolis.

Community gatherings provide a platform for developers to shape the future of operating systems such as Anolis OS.

InfoQ will host the DIVE Global Basic Software Innovation Conference 2021 in Beijing (Nov 26‑27), featuring a dedicated session on OS R&D practice.