OS News Archive

HD Guru writes that new HDTVs now have all the hardware (webcams, audio mics, Internet connectivity) and software (facial and speech recognition, etc) to make them ideal for data collection on those watching. Samsung, the article's focus, does not disclose what OS its new HDTVs use, making it hard to judge whether they are secure from hacking. A follow-up article prints Samsung's privacy statement along with evaluation by Gary Merson of HD Guru.

The just released version 12.02 of the Genode OS Framework takes the first steps to carry out the plan to turn the framework into a general-purpose OS for the daily use by its developers until the end of the year. It features a new ACPI driver, the first bits of a device-driver manager, support for using the fork syscall in GNU programs, and a PDF rendering engine. The most significant point of this release, however, is the way it was conducted. It represents the first version carried out using a completely open development process.

The last few weeks there's been a considerable amount of chatter on the web about whether or not a news website, blog, or some hybrid thereof, needs comments. Since we are working on the next version of OSNews, which means I've been thinking about things like this a lot, I figured I'd pen down my thoughts on comments.

There are two main kernel architectures for large operating systems; monolithic and micro. While these architectures are well thought out, well implemented (usually), and well understood, they have their faults. Mainly, the loading of modules and executables, management of memory, and interfacing between the kernel and software cause these architectures to be vastly complex. With this complexity comes a loss of speed and increased difficulty for the developer. There are other kernel architectures, such as the exokernel, that are vastly different from traditional architectures, but they still have performance issues caused by userland processes.

The Genode project has released version 11.11 of their OS framework, which allows the construction of spezialized operating systems out of building blocks including 8 different kernels, plenty of device drivers, and an increasing number of system services.

Version 0.71 of Visopsys has been unleashed into the wild. "The bulk of this release consists of general bug fixes, and improvements to hardware detection and device drivers, with particular focus on USB. New features include the ability to boot from a USB device (a new USB image is available for download) and the ability to power down the system."