OS News Archive

First of all: the entire OSNews team would like to wish you a very merry Christmas. Even if you're not religious, there's always porn on the internet, right? Anywho, these wishes are a bit tardy, but that's because I've been fighting a battle with my computer the past few days trying to find a way to record Minecraft footage so I could make a Christmas wish from inside my creations - a losing battle, so it would seem. So, for Christmas, I have two OSNews Asks items for you to ponder. First, help me record Minecraft footage. Second, and this is of more practical use to myself and probably others as well, help me to set up an automatic backup solution that backs up the contents of one folder on an external hard drive to another external drive.

I know that there's a number of readers who don't like it when OSnews covers political topics, I'm one of them. These political upheavals however spell danger for operating system hobbyists and so I dedicate this article to framing the political news within the context of what we are here to read about: operating systems.

The Genode project has released a bootable live CD showcasing the capabilities of their OS-construction framework. It boots in less than 10 seconds (on VirtualBox) to a fully functional graphical user interface featuring a selection of five subsystems (screenshot). Each subsystem demonstrates different aspects of the framework. One of the highlights is a web browser that is executed natively on the microkernel and is able to run a sandboxed Linux kernel as browser plugin. Among the other demos are the famous Gears OpenGL demo showing Gallium3D in action, and a user-level Linux seamlessly integrated into the system.

ChibiOS/RT 2.0.6 has been released. This new stable release fixes some minor bugs in the 2.0.x branch and brings performance improvements in the threads creation benchmark.
This efficient embedded RTOS supports multiple architectures like ARM7, ARM Cortex-M0, ARM Cortex-M3, MegaAVR, MSP430, Power Architecture, STM8 and others. A matrix of all the implemented features is available here.
ChibiOS/RT is licensed under the GPL with a linking exception allowing commercial applications.

Yesterday MenuetOS released a kernel update that includes Fourier transform, sinc and resampling. Fourier transform is significant in that it allow for more efficient computation and is essential for high speed computing.

Today, the Genode OS Framework has seen another feature-rich release, introducing support for hardware-accelerated graphics by the means of Gallium3D, wireless networking via the MadWifi communication stack, a new block-device infrastructure, and Qt4 version 4.6.3. Genode is a modular framework for building special-purpose operating systems, currently supporting 6 different kernels. With the new release, its device-driver coverage reaches a new level and brings the project one step closer towards the goal of shaping Genode to a general-purpose OS.