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.

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.

According to our roadmap, the next release, which is not that far away, will introduce support for the sun4v sub-architecture of sparc64, and the long awaited and wished-for TCP/IP networking stack. Early adopters and testers can preview both features in their staging branches (sun4v and networking).

After the 0.4.1 release, we abandoned our Subversion repository, leaving all change history behind, and moved on to Bazaar. The new repository is located at bzr://bzr.helenos.org/mainline and seamlessly continues where HelenOS 0.4.1 stopped. The old repository was made read-only and will stay around for the sake of searching the code history which predates HelenOS 0.4.1. We hope to be able to work more effectively with the new distributed version control system and look forward to the new cooperation possibilities it opens to the new potential developers.

After months of hard work and with great excitement, we are releasing HelenOS 0.4.1 to the wild today. The new version is codenamed Escalopino and brings a great deal of new features and improvements, as well as a large number of bug fixes. Because the enhancements are already too numerous to fit in this brief announcement, HelenOS 0.4.1 is the first release for which we are providing detailed release notes. HelenOS 0.4.1 can be downloaded from our download page.

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of HelenOS 0.4.0. This is the list of major improvements since the previous release:

• bdsh shell (simple CLI)
• task loader
• task tracer
• RAM disk support
• FAT file system support
• ia64 improvements
• ppc32 improvements
• sparc64 improvements
• better configuration system
• console speedups and improvements
• lots of bug fixes and other improvements

For download, see our download page.

Pavel Rimsky, a new core contributor, has recently added support for the newer UltraSPARC processors so that besides the already supported UltraSPARC I, II and IIi processors, HelenOS runs also on the newer SPARC V9 subarchitecture of UltraSPARC III, IIIi and IV. Pavel made it run on the simulated Serengeti machine and the real world Sun Blade 1500.

The FAT file system is now feature-wise on-par with the memory only TMPFS file system. Standard operations like open(), read(), write(), lseek(), close(), opendir(), readdir(), rewinddir(), closedir(), mkdir(), unlink(), rename(), getcwd() and chdir() are supported. Along with the new filesystem, a block cache layer was developed.

In a relatively short period of time, there have been multiple achievements on the HelenOS development front. In June, Martin Decky has reworked the userspace start up phase and allowed applications to be loaded from a file system (only TMPFS at that time). This effort was later in July improved by a new member of the development team, Jiri Svoboda, who integrated a full-fledged static loader, which is a part of his broader effort to deliver a dynamic loader. Another new contributor, Tim Post, has been diligently working on a simple command line interface that will allow us to work with the file system interactively. The command line interface, bdsh as Tim named it, is now soaking in the shell branch and awaits integration to trunk. Finally, Jakub Jermar improved the FAT server to the point when the read-only support is sort of working and HelenOS can boot from a FAT16 ramdisk.