OS News Archive

The rise of OSX (remember, when it came along Apple had a single-digit slice of the computer market) meant that people eventually got used to the idea of a life with no desktop personalization. Nowadays most people don’t even change their wallpapers anymore. In the old days of Windows 3.1, it was common to walk into an office and see each person’s desktop colors, fonts and wallpapers tuned to their personalities, just like their physical desk, with one’s family portrait or plants. It’s a big loss. Android and Linux desktops still offer massive amounts of personalisation options – thank god – but the the other major platforms have all individuality stamped out of them. It’s boring.

A number of new projects have been introduced during this release cycle, and many improvements have been landed. Very many bugs have been squashed. This list is an extreme over-simplification of the thousands of commits done since the last release. Hopefully, releases will happen more often so this is not always the case. • rmm, a complete rewrite of the kernel memory manager. This has eliminated kernel memory leaks, which became quite an issue with the previous memory manager. Additionally, multi-core support is far more stable.• Much of the work of RSoC, sponsored by donations to Redox OS, has been integrated into this new release. This includes work on ptrace, strace, gdb, disk partitioning, logging, io_uring, and more.• relibc has seen a large amount of work, culminating in improvements for anything that depends on it (i.e. everything in userspace). Redox is a UNIX-like operating system written in Rust, running on a microkernel.

Since OSNews’ inception in 1997 – yes, this site is that old – a lot has changed on the internet when it comes to earning income. While for a very long time a site like OSNews could sustain itself through revenue from basic ads alone, we’re now far beyond the point where that is feasible – unless we were to introduce ever more intrusive ads, which we’re obviously not going to do. Our readers are, of course, keenly aware of how expensive it can be to run a website like OSNews, and as such, many of you have asked us over the years for methods of supporting the website financially. We’ve always had a subscriber program for an ad-free version of the site, but we never really advertised it very heavily. Today, that’s going to change. You can now support OSNews by becoming an OSNews Patreon. With your support, we can keep posting stories every single day, pay the hosting bills, write more interesting articles, access interesting hardware to review for your amusement, and possibly expand into new territories like video reviews to accompany the regular written reviews. Your support will enable us to write reviews of older, vintage devices and software like Palm PDAs, Psion devices, old operating system versions, and much more. We’ve created three tiers – Silver, Gold, and Platinum – and at each of these tiers you’ll get the ad-free version of OSNews, as well as a silver, gold, or custom comment flair to show off your status as an OSNews Patreon. All of our readers are equal, of course, but OSNews Patreons are just a little more equal. If you want to support the continued work we do, head on over to the OSNews Patreon page and become an OSNews Patreon. Thank you – all of you, not just OSNews Patreons – for supporting the site! Important note: since Patreon has ended support for their API, we are not investing engineering hours into full integration of Patreon into OSNews. This means we have to add the rewards to your OSNews account manually. As such, it may take a few hours before your rewards are added to your account, depending on time zones, availability of OSNews staff, and so on. We will obviously do our best to make this process as quick as possible, but please bear with us. Frequently (?) Asked Questions Does this mean OSNews will start putting content behind Patreon-only paywalls? No. All of the stories and articles we post will remain freely available as they always have been, and even future articles made possible through Patreon supporters will always be available to everyone. The goal of the OSNews Patreon is to support OSNews as a whole, not just a small part of it. Can you give some examples of the kinds of articles you want to write that are impossible to do without more financial support? Sure! A great example of an article – or, more likely, series of articles – that I’ve been dying to write is one about one of the last Sun UltraSPARC multiprocessor workstations, fitted with one of the later SunPCI cards. I’m a huge fan of Sun’s workstation hardware, but getting access to relatively old and outdated hardware like this is surprisingly expensive. A successful Patreon could make this a reality. I also have a massive collection of PDAs, from the late 80s all the way up to the 2000s, that I would love to write more about. That takes a lot of time, and with the support of the OSNews Patreon I might be able to set aside time from my regular job to focus more on writing articles for OSNews. There are tons of other interesting topics that require expenses too, such as SGI’s IRIX, or Psion devices, or even modern computers like the new M1-based Macs. Will you introduce more tiers and benefits in the future? Possibly. We have a few other ideas that we need to flesh out further and reconsider before making any commitments. Why is the pricing in euros, and not in dollars or Canadian rubles? The pricing is set in euros, but Patreon shows the amounts converted to your local currency. Some users may still see the euro pricing, however, for instance when using a VPN. Can I cancel my Patreon or upgrade/downgrade to a different tier? Yes. Patreon as a platform offers all of these options at any time, so you’ll never have to feel tied down or locked into or out of a certain tier.

Operating systems and file systems have traditionally been developed hand in hand. They impose mutual constraints on each other. Today we have two major leaders in file system semantics: Windows and POSIX. They are very close to each other when compared to the full set of possibilities. Interesting things happened before POSIX monopolized file system semantics. When you use a file system through a library instead of going through the operating system there are some extra possibilities. You are no longer required to obey the host operating system’s semantics for filenames. You get to decide if you use / or \ to separate directory components (or something else altogether). Maybe you don’t even use strings for filenames. The fs-fatfs library uses a list of strings, so it’s up to the caller to define a directory separator for themselves. While working on that library, I was driven to write down some ideas that I’ve previously run across and found inspirational. A deep dive into file system hierarchies before the major platforms we used today – POSIX and Windows – became the two de-facto standards. Excellent article, and a joy to read.

Genode 20.05 takes our road map’s focus on the consolidation and optimization of the framework and its API to heart. It contains countless of under-the-hood improvements, mostly on the account of vastly intensified automated testing, the confrontation of Genode with increasingly complex software stacks, and stressful real-world work loads. You will find this theme throughout the release notes below. The result of this overhaul is captured in the updated version of the Genode Foundations book (Section New revision of the Genode Foundations book). I wish every project had release notes as detailed as Genode’s always are. Excellent work.

This post will give you a quick intro to the basics of GUI programming for SerenityOS. A one-line introduction that covers the article perfectly. A rarity, indeed. We covered SerenityOS late last year.