OS News Archive

"What would an operating system look like it if were redesigned with security in mind? Joanna Rutkowska thinks she has the answer with the development of Qubes OS. We sit down for an interview with Joanna to discuss the way Qubes OS augments security."

The microkernel developer community uses to be extremely fragmented. There exists a high variety of advanced microkernels each being developed with a different focus. However, since each kernel comes with its own minimalistic user land that is usually geared towards the special needs of its developers, none of those kernels has taken off in the domain of general-purpose computing. Genode has the mission to change that. Thanks to the tooling infrastructure that comes with the new version 11.08, the use of different microkernels has finally become a seamless experience. Those kernels including OKL4, L4/Fiasco, L4ka::Pistachio, NOVA, Codzero, and Fiasco.OC can be combined with the framework's steadily growing functionality such as a its new AHCI driver and Qt4.

SilveOS is a familiar-looking desktop "operating system" within a silverlight app. Just fire it up using any browser with Silverlight installed and start poking around.

InfoWorld's Galen Gruman highlights 18 technologies that remain core to the computing experience for IT, engineers, and developers 25 to 50 years since their inception. From Cobol, to the IBM mainframe, to C, to x86, these high-tech senior citizens not only keep kicking but provide the foundations for many vital systems that keep IT humming.

We at OSNews would like to extend our thoughts and sympathies to the victims of the horrible events that took place in Norway, yesterday. There really are no words to describe what has transpired, and as such, I won't even attempt to do so. Suffice to say, OSNews will be silent until after the weekend. I have lost my interest in writing and quibbling about stupid ones and zeros, at least for now. "No one will bomb us to silence, no one will shoot us to silence, no one will ever scare us from being Norway."

"Plan 9 has been forked to start a development out of the Bell Labs (or whatever they are called these days...). This true community-approach allows further development of Plan 9, even if the shrinking resources at Bell-Labs for Plan 9 are vanishing. The homepage and the code can be both found at Google code. You can boot 9front from the regulary built live cd or build the binaries in your existing Plan 9 installation. Installation instructions and further information can be obtained at the 9front wiki."

No, your eyes aren't deceiving you - we have actually have not one, but two news items on hobby/small operating systems on the same day! You thought the day would never come again, but hey, here we are. You're welcome. Now, what are we talking about? FreeDOS - a test release has been, uh, released for FreeDOS 1.1.

The Be operating system file system, known simply as BFS, is the file system for the Haiku, BeOS, and SkyOS operating systems. When it was created in the late '90s as part of the ill-fated BeOS project, BFS's ahead-of-its-time feature set immediately struck the fancy OS geeks . . . we'll take a look at the legendary BFS, starting with some filesystem basics and moving on to a discussion of the above features.

Lots of feedback from Alfman in the previous article's comments meant that it was time for another version of my article on my RPC-based daemon model, and as such another iteration towards a final design of my OS' core IPC mechanism. Not a full rewrite this time, but rather incremental improvements on specific points, which include a choice of naming (nonblocking RPC it is), an improved coverage of pointers, shared memory, and the currently envisioned design limits of those, and explicit support for dynamic setup of RPC calls and graceful server death handling.

Okay, so building up on the feedback given on the previous item on that topic (thanks everyone, and xiaokj, Alfman and Brendan in particular!), I have tried to improve the design of my daemon and service model a bit further. Here is the new version, feel free to study and discuss it!

You don't need a Chromebook to try Google's Linux-based Chrome OS. Here's how to give it a try today.

The concern for efficient and easy-to-use inter-process communication is prevalent among microkernel-based operating systems. Genode has always taken an unorthodox stance on this subject by disregarding the time-tested standard solution of using an IDL compiler in favour of sticking to raw C++ mechanisms. The new version 11.05 of the OS framework takes another leap by introducing a brand new API for implementing procedure calls across process boundaries, facilitating type safety and ease of use, yet still not relying on external tools. Furthermore, the platform support for the Fiasco.OC kernel has been extended to the complete feature set of the framework. The most significant new features are L4Linux (on Fiasco.OC), an experimental integration of GDB, ARM RealView PBX device drivers, and device I/O support for the MicroBlaze platform.

Ever since iPhoneOS (now iOS) has been released, there's an old fight going on about how multitasking should work on personal computers, and more specially what should happen to applications which are put in the background. Some advocate that they should be dipped in virtual liquid nitrogen and stop doing anything, like on iOS, which others advocate that they should continue to run in the background, like on desktop OSs. What about putting a little more flexibility in there?

BareMetal Node is a HPC platform based off of BareMetal OS. The kernel binary on the nodes is 6KiB and mainly contains the network and disk drivers. A C or Assembly program can make use of all available CPU cores via the Orchestrator program that controls what the nodes are working on.