About HelenOS
Rather sooner than later, HelenOS will become a complete and usable modern operating system, offering room for experimenting and research. HelenOS uses its own microkernel written from scratch and supports SMP, multitasking and multithreading on both 32-bit and 64-bit, little-endian and big-endian processor architectures, among which are AMD64/EM64T (x86-64), ARM, IA-32, IA-64 (Itanium), 32-bit MIPS, 32-bit PowerPC and SPARC V9. Thanks to the relatively high number of supported architectures and suitable design, HelenOS is very portable. On top of the microkernel, HelenOS provides services such as file systems, networking, device drivers and user interface. Most of these services are composed of multiple independent server processes, which makes HelenOS one of the most modular operating systems.
As of now, HelenOS is being developed mostly by faculty members, and former and contemporary students of Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague. Nonetheless, the project is open for everyone, so we also have developers with different backgrounds from various places around the world. The source code is open and available under the BSD license. Some third party components, and components based on GPL software, are licensed under GPL.
In case you are interested in our project or have any questions about it, feel free to subscribe to our mailing list or chat with us on our IRC channel. The HelenOS operating system is, as of today, feature incomplete and the project is currently under heavy development (see roadmap). We are looking for people to join our team as co-developers or to merely try out our system and become our beta testers. If you have the skills and enthusiasm, you may consider making a contribution.
GSoC students announced!
Submitted by jermar on Tue, 04/24/2012 - 13:45.We are very pleased to announce the five GSoC students who will be working on HelenOS projects this summer:
- Vivek Prakash: Port GNU Compiler Collection (gcc) to HelenOS
- Sean Bartell: Structured binary data tools
- Adam Hraška: Resizable, scalable, concurrent hash-table
- Julia G. Medvedeva: UDF file system server
- Tobias Börtitz: HelenOS as a Genode platform
We wish Vivek, Sean, Adam, Julia and Tobias the best luck and are looking forward to all the new exciting contributions they will bring.
GSoC 2012 applications are in
Submitted by admin on Tue, 04/10/2012 - 15:24.The GSoC 2012 student application period is now over. We would like to thank all the students for submitting their applications, for sending their patches to our mailing list and discussing their proposals.
For your information, please see below a graph of applications against time plotted using the spreadsheet by Olly Betts. You can use it to compare the trend with other GSoC 2012 mentoring organizations.
HelenOS is a Google Summer of Code 2012 mentoring organization!
Submitted by jermar on Sat, 03/17/2012 - 19:20.After making a very successful Google Summer of Code debut last year, we are pleased to announce that HelenOS has been accepted as a mentoring organization for 2012 again. In the Google Summer of Code, university and college students work during the summer break and contribute code to open source projects represented by the accepted mentoring organizations. During the duration of the program, Google provides stipends to successful students that sum up to $5000 at the end of the program.
HelenOS at Microkernel Devroom @ FOSDEM 2012
Submitted by admin on Mon, 01/30/2012 - 15:29.
The HelenOS team is organizing the Microkernel OS Devroom at FOSDEM 2012. If you are interested in hearing what is new not only in the world of HelenOS, but also other state-of-the-art microkernel operating systems, consider visiting FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels from February 4th to 5th.
PCC and binutils screencast
Submitted by jermar on Mon, 07/25/2011 - 15:59.Petr Koupý created a HelenOS screencast showing his and Jiří Zárevúcky's progress on porting parts of binutils and pcc to HelenOS. Both Petr an Jiří work on HelenOS as part of their Google Summer of Code internship. It's just shortly after the program's midterm, but the video already shows that their version of HelenOS can build a playable tetris binary from sources - something which was not possible until now.
HelenOS has got native USB support
Submitted by jermar on Fri, 06/17/2011 - 15:54.Today has been the D day for the student team that implemented the brand new USB framework for HelenOS. Their code was merged into the main HelenOS development branch last week and today they defended the project in front of the Project Committee at MFF UK. Thanks to their work, HelenOS now features the ability to support USB 1.1 and, to some extent, also USB 2.0 devices. More information can be found in the quite extensive documentation the USB team produced. USB support will be one of the major features in the next official HelenOS release.
Accepted GSoC Students & Projects
Submitted by jermar on Tue, 04/26/2011 - 18:55.We are pleased to announce the three students and their projects accepted by our mentoring organization to this year's Google Summer of Code:
- Jiří Zárevúcky will be mentored by Martin Děcký and will be working on:
C compiler toolchain and library improvements for HelenOS - Oleg Romanenko will be mentored by Jakub Jermář and will be working on:
FAT server improvement: FAT12, FAT32, exFAT, LFN - Petr Koupý will be mentored by Jiří Svoboda and will be working on:
Enhancement of libc implementation driven by porting binutils
HelenOS 0.4.3 (Sashimi) Released!
Submitted by jermar on Sat, 03/26/2011 - 19:37.The HelenOS team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of HelenOS 0.4.3, codenamed Sashimi. The new release fixes many bugs and brings a lot of improvements in areas so diverse such as new hardware platform support, userspace device driver framework, device drivers, observability and robustness, programming languages, file systems and networking. For the complete list of user-visible changes, see the release notes. The released files can be downloaded from the project's download page.
HelenOS is a Google Summer of Code 2011 mentoring organization!
Submitted by jermar on Fri, 03/18/2011 - 22:24.We are pleased to announce that HelenOS has been accepted for this year's Google Summer of Code program as a mentoring organization. In the Google Summer of Code, university and college students work during the summer break and contribute code to open source projects represented by the accepted mentoring organizations. During the duration of the program, Google provides stipends to successful students that sum up to $5000 at the end of the program.
