http://www.helenos.org/About HelenOSRather sooner than later, HelenOS will become a complete and usable modern operating system, offering room for experimenting and research. HelenOS uses its own microkernel written from scratch and supports SMP, multitasking and multithreading on both 32-bit and 64-bit, little-endian and big-endian processor architectures, among which are AMD64/EM64T (x86-64), ARM, IA-32, IA-64 (Itanium), 32-bit MIPS, 32-bit PowerPC and SPARC V9. Thanks to the relatively high number of supported architectures and suitable design, HelenOS is very portable. On top of the microkernel, HelenOS provides services such as file systems, networking, device drivers and user interface. Most of these services are composed of multiple independent server processes, which makes HelenOS one of the most modular operating systems. As of now, HelenOS is being developed mostly by faculty members, and former and contemporary students of Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague. Nonetheless, the project is open for everyone, so we also have developers with different backgrounds from various places around the world. The source code is open and available under the BSD license. Some third party components, and components based on GPL software, are licensed under GPL. In case you are interested in our project or have any questions about it, feel free to subscribe to our mailing list or chat with us on our IRC channel. The HelenOS operating system is, as of today, feature incomplete and the project is currently under heavy development (see roadmap). We are looking for people to join our team as co-developers or to merely try out our system and become our beta testers. If you have the skills and enthusiasm, you may consider making a contribution. HelenOS 0.4.2 (Skewer) Released!Submitted by jermar on Wed, 03/10/2010 - 23:39.After seven months since the previous release, the HelenOS team is proud to announce the immediate availability of our newest and greatest release: HelenOS 0.4.2 codenamed Skewer. This version fixes many bugs and introduces many new features such as a modular TCP/IP networking stack, support for the UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors, improved debugging capabilities and of course a couple of new servers and applications. A more detailed summary can be found in our release notes. Staging branches for sun4v and networkingSubmitted by jermar on Wed, 01/13/2010 - 12:13.According to our roadmap, the next release, which is not that far away, will introduce support for the sun4v sub-architecture of sparc64, and the long awaited and wished-for TCP/IP networking stack. Early adopters and testers can preview both features in their staging branches (sun4v and networking). HelenOS switches to Bazaar VCSSubmitted by jermar on Thu, 08/06/2009 - 16:30.After the 0.4.1 release, we abandoned our Subversion repository, leaving all change history behind, and moved on to Bazaar. The new repository is located at bzr://bzr.helenos.org/head and seamlessly continues where HelenOS 0.4.1 stopped. The old repository was made read-only and will stay around for the sake of searching the code history which predates HelenOS 0.4.1. We hope to be able to work more effectively with the new distributed version control system and look forward to the new cooperation possibilities it opens to the new potential developers. HelenOS 0.4.1 (Escalopino) Released!Submitted by jermar on Tue, 08/04/2009 - 00:38.After months of hard work and with great excitement, we are releasing HelenOS 0.4.1 to the wild today. The new version is codenamed Escalopino and brings a great deal of new features and improvements, as well as a large number of bug fixes. Because the enhancements are already too numerous to fit in this brief announcement, HelenOS 0.4.1 is the first release for which we are providing detailed release notes. HelenOS 0.4.1 can be downloaded from our download page. HelenOS 0.4.0 (Sinister Valentine) Released!Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 02/14/2009 - 00:32.We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of HelenOS 0.4.0. This is the list of major improvements since the previous release:
For download, see our download page. Improved support for UltraSPARC processorsSubmitted by Anonymous on Sun, 12/07/2008 - 11:14.Pavel Rimsky, a new core contributor, has recently added support for the newer UltraSPARC processors so that besides the already supported UltraSPARC I, II and IIi processors, HelenOS runs also on the newer SPARC V9 subarchitecture of UltraSPARC III, IIIi and IV. Pavel made it run on the simulated Serengeti machine and the real world Sun Blade 1500. FAT support deliveredSubmitted by Anonymous on Mon, 12/01/2008 - 20:29.The FAT file system is now feature-wise on-par with the memory only TMPFS file system. Standard operations like open(), read(), write(), lseek(), close(), opendir(), readdir(), rewinddir(), closedir(), mkdir(), unlink(), rename(), getcwd() and chdir() are supported. Along with the new filesystem, a block cache layer was developed. Harvest SeasonSubmitted by Anonymous on Fri, 08/15/2008 - 08:57.In a relatively short period of time, there have been multiple achievements on the HelenOS development front. In June, Martin Decky has reworked the userspace start up phase and allowed applications to be loaded from a file system (only TMPFS at that time). This effort was later in July improved by a new member of the development team, Jiri Svoboda, who integrated a full-fledged static loader, which is a part of his broader effort to deliver a dynamic loader. Another new contributor, Tim Post, has been diligently working on a simple command line interface that will allow us to work with the file system interactively. The command line interface, bdsh as Tim named it, is now soaking in the shell branch and awaits integration to trunk. Finally, Jakub Jermar improved the FAT server to the point when the read-only support is sort of working and HelenOS can boot from a FAT16 ramdisk. Debugging, tracing and dynamic linkingSubmitted by Anonymous on Tue, 05/13/2008 - 21:31.There is a new branch in our repository dedicated to debugging, tracing and dynamic loading. It is a work in progress, but some bits (e.g. tracing) are already pretty functional. Jiri Svoboda, the author of these changes, is working on this as part of his master thesis. If you want to keep pace with him and his new branch, I suggest you track our helenos-commits@ and/or helenos-devel@ mailing lists. |
