OS News Archive

B Labs demonstrates Codezero Embedded Hypervisor virtualizing an Android instance on Pandaboard with a dual-core Cortex-A9 based TI OMAP4 SoC. Codezero Embedded Hypervisor is a hybrid L4 microkernel that also acts as a Linux virtualization solution (currently version 0.4.4 in the demo). Earlier versions of Codezero are open source B Labs also releases open API toolkits for the hypervisor enabling operating systems and baremetal software development on multicore ARM processors.

"Itsy-OS v0.1 is a small 8086 operating system kernel providing two basic services: a simple preemptive task switcher and memory management. If necessary, simple IPC and task management can be added to provide the features of a traditional microkernel. Weighing in at about 380 bytes, Itsy should port well to tiny architectures."

HelenOS is a modern microkernel-based multiserver operating system running on a large variety of processor architectures. Version 0.4.3 thereof has been just released. The new release fixes many bugs and brings a lot of improvements in areas so diverse such as new hardware platform support, userspace device driver framework, device drivers, observability and robustness, programming languages, file systems and networking. For the complete list of user-visible changes, see the release notes. The released files can be downloaded from the project's download page.

"Right now, someone, somewhere is developing the killer operating system feature of the future - a feature that will change computing and make us wonder how we lived without it. However, the person responsible probably isn't grafting away in the labs of Microsoft, Apple or Red Hat - he or she is more likely to be working in a bedroom or loft. We'll look at the best alternative operating systems, with the potential to change the computing landscape over the next decade."

Oh. My. God. When I read this, and browsed the website, my face went like this. Do you remember the Amiga? That fun little computer that was miles ahead of its competition, but in recent years has been dragged through the mud by one shady figure after the next? Here's a new one: Amiga, Inc., the one 'run' by Bill McEwen, has partnered with a company called IContain to slap the Amiga logo on a bunch of low-end, incredibly sad products. Whether this is another shady deal I don't know, but worthy of the Amiga? I don't think so. I'm not putting this in the Amiga category, by the way. I refuse to. Forget it. It's going into our generic category. Fitting. Update: As was pointed out over at AmigaWorld.net, not only are these nothing more than brandless OEM products with Photoshopped logos, the website itself is just a standard, unmodified WordPress theme. Oi. Doesn't instil a lot of confidence, now, does it?

The just released version 11.02 of the Genode OS Framework pushes its platform support to 8 different kernels. Genode allows the construction of specialized operating systems by combining one of those kernels with a steadily growing number of ready-to-use components. The new platform additions are the support for Fiasco.OC, which is a modern capability-based microkernel, the upgrade to the NOVA hypervisor 0.3, and a custom kernel implementation specifically targeted to softcore CPUs as employed in FPGA-based SoCs. Functionality-wise, Genode 11.02 features the first parts of a new execution environment for running command-line-based GNU software natively on Genode.

Now that you have an idea of where your OS project is heading as a whole, it's time to go into specifics. The first component of your OS which you'll have to design, if you're building it from the ground up, is its kernel, so this article aims at being a quick guide to kernel design, describing the major areas which you'll have to think about and guiding you to places where you can find more information on the subject.

The 0.7 version of the Visopsys desktop operating system has been released. "More than four years in the making, this is a major new release offering an updated look and a number of new features, including JPEG image support, image resizing, 64-bit disk support, UDF (DVD) filesystem support, and GPT partition table support, as well as lots of new icons, wallpaper images, and file browsing functionality. New administrative applications and functionality have been added, and the ATA/IDE driver has been enhanced, including the ability to better support backwards-compatible SATA controllers. FPU context saving has been improved, and a number of tweaks and bug fixes are also included."

So you have taken the test and you think you are ready to get started with OS development? At this point, many OS-deving hobbyists are tempted to go looking for a simple step-by-step tutorial which would guide them into making a binary boot, do some text I/O, and other "simple" stuff. The implicit plan is more or less as follow: any time they'll think about something which in their opinion would be cool to implement, they'll implement it. Gradually, feature after feature, their OS would supposedly build up, slowly getting superior to anything out there. This is, in my opinion, not the best way to get somewhere (if getting somewhere is your goal). In this article, I'll try to explain why, and what you should be doing at this stage instead in my opinion.

In this series of OS News articles, I'vedescribed how to refurbish maturecomputers. One useful technique is torun multiple operating systems on a singlecomputer. This retains the benefits of the existing Windows install andcouples it with the advantages of open source software.Thisarticle explores different techniques to runmultiple operating systems on one computer and discusses theirbenefits andshortcomings.

RT-Thread RTOS is an open source real-time operating system for embedded system or microcontrollers, with components which include a hard real-time kernel, a command line shell, a device virtual file system, and a graphic user interface.

It's recently been a year since I started working on my pet OS project, and I often end up looking backwards at what I have done, wondering what made things difficult in the beginning. One of my conclusions is that while there's a lot of documentation on OS development from a technical point of view, more should be written about the project management aspect of it. Namely, how to go from a blurry "I want to code an OS" vision to either a precise vision of what you want to achieve, or the decision to stop following this path before you hit a wall. This article series aims at putting those interested in hobby OS development on the right track, while keeping this aspect of things in mind.

Codezero Embedded Hypervisor Toolkit v0.4.1 has been released for TI OMAP4 dual-core Cortex-A9 Pandaboard platform. Please take a look at the download page for the project installer and tarball packages. Available in this release is a prebuilt hypervisor toolkit for userspace application development. The toolkit brings up two cores as a real-time executive and is meant for running baremetal software on the low cost OMAP4 ARM Cortex-A9 hardware from TI. Virtualized Android and Linux editions are also planned for a later release.

What were the big themes this year? Which stories on OSNews were the most popular? We dove into our database (well, Adam did), and compiled a list of 2010's ten most popular stories on OSNews. As a metric, we didn't look at silly things like hits or whatever, but at the only metric that matters on OSNews, the only metric which really indicates what our registered (and thus, loyal) readers loved to argue about this year: number of comments. Yes, that headline is intentionally confusing.