OS News Archive

With the just released version 10.05, the Genode OS Framework reaches out to new application areas by providing a solution for subjecting all processes to mandatory access control, and adding the infrastructure needed for high-quality audio processing. On the way towards running general-purpose OS workloads, the port of the Webkit-based Arora web browser running as a native Genode process marks a pivotal point for the project.

EyeOS has released version 2.0 Beta. "After several months of hard work we're happy to announce the immediate availability of the official release of eyeOS 2.0 Beta. And even more: the new release doesn't come alone but with the brand new eyeOS.org website, which has not ben redesigned for the last 2 years now. eyeOS 2.0 Beta can be downloaded from the new downloads page and tested from a Beta test server in eyeOS.info."

This article falls under the category of emulation. The venerable DOSBox emulator has been incremented to version 0.74. DOSBox emulates an IBM compatible PC computer running MS-DOS and is great for all you retro gamers or those wishing to run legacy applications. Personally I would love to relive the past with all the great games of yore. There is an extensive change log listing all the improvements, so head on over to the official website to peruse them.

There's one complaint we here at OSNews get thrown in our faces quite often: what's up with the lack of, you know, operating system news on OSNews? Why so much mobile phone news? Why so much talk of H264, HTML5, and Flash? Where's the juicy news on tomorrow's operating systems? Since it's weekend, I might as well explain why things are the way they are. Hint: it has nothing to do with a lack of willingness.

RT-Thread RTOS is an open source real-time operating system for 16-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers, with components which include a hard real-time kernel, a command line shell, a device virtual file system, and a graphic user interface. RT-Thread RTOS 0.4.x series will be licensed under the Apache License v2.

"In 2007, OSNews ran an article about OPIUM, showing how to cast apt-get installation problems (choosing which of several possible dependencies to install) as a set of pseudo-boolean constraints which could then be solved mathematically to give the optimal solution. We have recently adapted this technique to Zero Install, addressing some problems experienced by the Sugar environment (One Laptop Per Child) and allowing better integration with distribution packages."

"Joanna Rutkowska, a security researcher known for her work on virtualization security and low-level rootkits, has released a new open-source operating system meant to provide isolation of the OS's components for better security. The OS, called Qubes, is based on Xen, X and Linux and is in a basic, alpha stage right now. Qubes relies on virtualization to separate applications running on the OS and also places many of the system-level components in sandboxes to prevent them from affecting each other."

"ScaraOS is a 32bit mutiboot OS kernel for IA32 (PC/AT) systems. I wrote it to teach myself OS fundamentals and just to have a bit of fun. It already has PCI support, the beginnings of a paged memory management system, and the start of a VFS layer. It supports the basic PC/AT stuff such as timer, PIC, keyboard, floppy."

BeRTOS 2.4 has been released. "This is a major stable release, compatible with earlier versions. The most outstanding feature is the official release of the preemptive kernel and many other optimizations to context switching routines and the default scheduler. Other additions are dynamic stack allocation for processes (classic static allocation is still available), the ability to configure the heap module using the Wizard, a very low-overhead timer-based scheduler, and a new driver for Texas Instruments TLV5618 DAC."

Online advertising has been a hot topic for the past week or so, with Ars Technica trying out an interesting, somewhat desperate experiment wherein they blocked access to their content for people using Adblock. Of course, if this were to become some kind of movement among publishers, it would probably just spark a technological cat-and-mouse game that would surely be reminiscent of DRM cracking or iPhone jailbreaking. But in their post-mortem, Ars states that it was a worthwhile awareness campaign, and I hope that's true. But I thought it would be a good idea to try to bring the collective OSNews brainpower together and crowdsource the idea of how to raise money for a web site in an age where advertising is increasingly un-viable.

With the new version 10.02, the Genode OS Framework significantly extends its supported base platforms by the addition of two modern microkernels, namely Codezero and NOVA. In contrast to most operating systems that are tied to one respective kernel, Genode enables the development of specialized component-based operating systems that are portable across 6 different kernels including the whole family of open-source L4 kernels. Each kernel has different strengths, which increasingly become available at the framework's API level. For example, the new version 10.02 enables applications to benefit from the real-time scheduling as provided by the OKL4 and L4ka::Pistachio kernels.

Contiki is an open source, low-power operating system for networked embedded systems. It includes the worlds smallest IPv6 stack and provides full IP networking in a few kilobytes of RAM, as well as low-power mechanism that makes a tiny radio-equipped microcontroller run for years on a pair of batteries. Version 2.4 has been released today.

"Five years ago, the open source Xen hypervisor was the primary technology that big vendors like IBM and Red Hat were adopting and pushing. In 2010, that's no longer the case as the rival KVM effort is now getting the attention of both IBM and Red Hat, as well as many others in the Linux ecosystem. So what does this mean for the KVM community and the future of Xen? An IBM study looking at who's most involved in KVM may provide some answers."

This is part three of Ars' guide about virtualisation. "Part 1 described three ways in which a component might be virtualized; emulation, "classic" virtualization, and paravirtualization, and part 2 described in more detail how each of these methods was used in CPU virtualization. But the CPU is not the only part of a computer that can use these techniques; although hardware devices are quite different from a CPU, similar approaches are equally useful."