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.
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.
New defended master thesis: Modern operating system without MMU
Submitted by jermar on Sat, 02/05/2011 - 00:48.Earlier this week, Jiri Tlach successfully defended his truly exciting master thesis in which he describes what it takes to modify a microkernel-based operating system designed with MMU in mind to run on a processor without MMU. If you can read Czech, you can enjoy Jiri's thesis here.
New master theses defended
Submitted by jermar on Tue, 09/14/2010 - 12:33.It is that time of the year again when fresh graduates from the Charles University publish their defended HelenOS master theses. Visit our documentation page to read about Lenka's, Tomas' and Stanislav's work in areas as diverse as device drivers, task snapshotting and system monitoring.
HelenOS ported to Neo FreeRunner smartphone
Submitted by jermar on Sat, 07/17/2010 - 12:53.During the just concluded HelenOS Camp 2010, Jiri Svoboda managed to get HelenOS running on the Neo FreeRunner smart phone. In doing so, Jiri discovered and fixed several hard to find occurrences of instruction sequences that the ARM architecture treats as unpredictable. Unsurprisingly, these were caught by the attempt to run HelenOS on the real ARM hardware, which is much more sensitive to undefined behavior than any of the two simulators we have been using so far. At the moment, the port is lacking some way of input, but other than that, it is on par with the other HelenOS ports. Of course, one can't make phone calls from it, but as soon as we have some input driver, it will be possible to ping localhost, play tetris or do all the other stuff that people can do with HelenOS.
HelenOS 0.4.2 (Skewer) Released!
Submitted by jermar on Wed, 03/10/2010 - 23:39.After seven months since the previous release, the HelenOS team is proud to announce the immediate availability of our newest and greatest release: HelenOS 0.4.2 codenamed Skewer. This version fixes many bugs and introduces many new features such as a modular TCP/IP networking stack, support for the UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors, improved debugging capabilities and of course a couple of new servers and applications. A more detailed summary can be found in our release notes.
