China’s KylinOS Linux takes a great leap forward to v11 and kernel 6.6

China’s KylinSoft has delivered a major update to its flagship Linux, which Beijing hailed as a great leap forward for the nation’s ambition to develop operating systems that match and exceed the capabilities of western products.

KylinOS 11, announced on Wednesday, uses version 6.6 of the Linux kernel and runs on processors from AMD and Intel, plus eight Chinese CPUs that mostly use their own instruction set architectures. The OS can also work with seven Chinese GPUs, plus accelerators from AMD and Nvidia.

Versions for desktops and servers arrived at the same time, complete with an AI assistant, model context protocol, cloud integration, and enhanced security.

Chen Zhihua, party secretary of Kylin Software and the company’s Chairman, said KylinOS is already China’s most-used domestic OS with 16 million installations. In a nation of 1.4 billion people, that’s minuscule market share. But state media ...