OS News Archive

FreeRTOS is a portable open source (GPL) real-time operating system for embedded devices. It offers a smaller and easier real-time processing alternative for applications where eCOS and embedded Linux (or Real Time Linux) won't fit, are not appropriate, or are not available. FreeRTOS runs on a bunch of architectures, both 8- and 16-bit. TCP/IP support is provided either from the uIP software TCP/IP stack (live demo server here) or by using the Wiznet hardware TCP/IP co-processor (live demo server here).

Visopsys is an alternative operating system for PC compatible computers. This is a maintenance release, with numerous small improvements and bugfixes including some general back- porting from the 0.6 development branch. In addition, IDE disk-to-disk operations have been improved so that they can happen in parallel, the kernel hardware drivers have been given a new interrupt handing interface, and there is some improved efficiency in a performance-critical section of the multitasker.

Version 1.0b6 of TextOS, the floppy-based operating system/programming language built on top of FreeDOS, was released. Released a month after the previous release, it features various bug fixes.

Prex, a portable real-time operating system for embedded systems, is a small, reliable and low power micro kernel designed specifically for the small memory footprint system. Prex 0.1 is the first public release, and includes kernel, syscall library, sample hello world application, and some technical documents.

Spoon is a hobby OS, a microkernel that's fairly complete. In order to test it, Durand John Miller also building an operating system on top of the kernel.

Portable, compact, and simple hobby Operating System for the 64bit age: AireOS.

MenuetOS 0.78 is released. Changes: New Panel and Menu system, new options for Windows, automatic memory detection, .ICO support, and faster rendering, updated JPEGVIEW application; Displays jpeg image as backgound, new launcher application; Startup applications, PCNET32 Ethernet Driver, it now works with VMWare, TCP/IP bug fixes to TCP retransmissions, window resizing/moving.

I have interviewed the author of the fascinating software Contiki OS, lwIP, uIP and protothreads, and asked him questions about the software itself, the way he develops on embedded platforms, as well as his interests in sensor networks and opensource.

"So what should the OS vendors be doing? I can think of five things that operating system developers should look at having part of the OS." Read Brad Wardell's editorial here.

When I joined OSNews in 2001, I did it with a great excitment because of my love for... messing around with many operating systems in order to explore news ways of doing things. Back in the '80s and the '90s there were a lot of OS projects that would draw the attention of the computer users of the time. But in this decade, it seems that other than Windows, OSX, Linux and a very few other much smaller OSes, the scene is sterile. And it's only getting worse.

QEMU is a generic and open source processor emulator which achieves a good emulation speed by using dynamic translation. Its sporting a new module called the 'Accelerator' which can achieve near native speeds, and currently runs on Linux 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels. This means you could theoretically run Windows (or another OS) on a Linux machine at near native speeds without buying a commercial emulator.

The results are in! The winners of the giveaway are: In the "new member" category: Pascal Hos. In the "existing members" category: Robert Kerby and Jeremy Messenger. In the "commenters" category: Rayiner Hashem and "therandthem." If you are one of these winners, and you haven't received an email from us yet, contact us right away. Thanks to all the new members who signed up in the past two weeks. We'll try to have more giveaways soon!

As mentioned last week, we have five fine books to give away. Two will go to existing OSNews members, two will go to readers, members or not, who participate in enlightened discourse on our comments and forums, and one will go to a new member who signed up between last week and tomorrow. Only a handful of people have signed up as new members, so if you sign up today, you have a great chance of winning a free book. Winners will be chosen this weekend, so you only have one more day to make yourself eligible.

Miray Software announces that the real-time operating system µnOS is available for XScale processors as from now. The porting has been accomplished in collaboration with Technische Universität München (TU). This is an important step for Miray Software on the way to establish µnOS in the field of mobile and power saving embedded systems.