OS News Archive

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.

I just want to put up a little notice to inform you all about the lack of updates on the main page. The problem is that I've been hit by the flu and have been down and out since last Thursday, unable to do the news. The rest of the team has been occupied as well, so that explains that. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, and since I've pretty much almost recovered, normal posting schedule will resume either tomorrow or Wednesday at the latest. Thanks for understanding. Also, read more for the most beautiful piece of art ever created in the history of the universe. And I mean it.

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.

Documentation on how to create a FreeBSD DomU is scarse, so I wrote this step-by-step guide, to guide users from the initial download to a complete, running FreeBSD DomU under a Linux Dom0 Xen host. The guide covers creating the initial Xen kernel, configuring the Xen host, generating the correct configurations, resizing FreeBSD partitions in Xen and cleanly booting the final OS. In the process, we will also create a template disk image which can be used to generate new VM's very quickly. The entire process can be completed in under an hour the first time, and only takes 5-10 minutes to re-generate future VM's.

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.

Check out the new screencast presenting the Genode Live CD 10.11. For those of you who like to get a glimpse of the recently released Live CD but hesitate to download and boot the ISO image, the Genode developers have prepared a screencast on Youtube with a guided walk-through.

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 version 10.11 of the Genode OS construction framework has been released. Driven by the requirements for the recently published Live CD, the new version features an execution environment for drivers of the gPXE project, an on-demand-paged ISO9660 file system, alpha-blending support for the GUI server, a new virtual network bridge, and a http-based block driver. Enjoy the release notes for the full story.

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.

"This release builds upon the work done for the 2.5 series, and delivers many new drivers for internal MCU peripherals, USB support, Atmel SAM3N support, and a new API for block devices. New supported CPU: Atmel SAM3N Cortex-M3. Atmel ATmega1280 and Arduino Mega code. New module: USB support for STM32. New drivers: usb-serial, USB keyboard, and USB mouse. A new interface for block devices: KBlock. A new module: generic event completion infrastructure. A new and more flexible I2C API."

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.

ScaraOS is a 32-bit, multiboot-compliant, monolithic OS kernel. It has the beginnings of a paged VM system and VFS. It supports PCI, DMA, AT floppies (read only), EXT2, and can do all the low-level stuff expected of an OS kernel (program the PIC, handle interrupts, control the timer, etc.). It was written primarily to learn OS fundamentals. It boots using any multiboot bootloader, and it has been tested with grub on qemu and KVM. Bootable floppy images are available.

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.

Once upon a time, operating systems used to matter a lot; they defined what a computer could and couldn't do... Today, there's only one operating system: Unix (okay, there are two, but we'll get to that). This is why I contend that the OS doesn't matter - or that we need to take another look at the word's content, at what we mean when we say 'Operating System'.