There is a new branch in our repository dedicated to debugging, tracing and dynamic loading. It is a work in progress, but some bits (e.g. tracing) are already pretty functional. Jiri Svoboda, the author of these changes, is working on this as part of his master thesis. If you want to keep pace with him and his new branch, I suggest you track our helenos-commits@ and/or helenos-devel@ mailing lists.

After several months of development, HelenOS 0.3.0 has been finally released. This version contains the new file system framework, including the VFS service, supporting libraries and an example, memory-based, file system implementation called TMPFS. This release also brings important improvements of the ia64 port as well as enhancements of the IPC subsystem.

Today, Dec 19 2007, at 17:39, I have successfully mounted an instance of the not-yet-finished tmpfs file system as a root file system and opened a file located on it. It should not take long before we are able to read from and write to this file system, as well as to perform other operations.

Update: on Dec 23 2007, around 23:38, HelenOS successfully completed its historical first read from a file on a tmpfs file system. Merry Christmas!

Update: on Feb 21 2008, the last unimplemented VFS operation remains rename(). Other than that, the VFS and TMPFS are capable enough, to handle all major file system calls, i.e. mount(), open(), close(), read(), write(), lseek(), ftruncate(), opendir(), readdir(), rewinddir(), closedir(), mkdir(), rmdir() and unlink().

Recently I have been delighted to watch the growing interest in our project. Not only are there more and more people on the project's mailing list and not only I receive increasing amount of questions about HelenOS from colleagues, friends and other people, but there are currently four HelenOS-related master theses in progress at Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, Charles University.

After two very successful kernel camps in 2005 and 2006, a couple of HelenOS developers gathered again in order to work together for several days. The HelenOS Camp 2007 took place between September 27 and September 30 in Beroun, Czech Republic. There were several topics on the agenda, such as work on the virtual file system server (VFS) and the FAT file system implementation, device mapper task, improvements of the IPC so that data can pass multiple tasks without being shared or copied by the middle-men tasks, and also getting the ia64 port to run natively. More on the accomplishments of the camp can be found here and here.

HelenOS 0.2.0.5 has just been released. The release fixes several hard hangs and de-oversynchronizes certain areas of the kernel. This release also adds the new arm32 port as well as a simplified task termination. Smaller fixes here and there and greatly improved IPC in-source documentation. Go to the download page.

Current status of the arm32 port has been presented (in czech) by Petr Stepan.

Today, Jakub Jermar completed his master thesis about porting the SPARTAN kernel to the SPARC V9 architecture. Download the text of the thesis here. During work on his thesis, Jakub brought support for sparc64 into HelenOS.

Work on the arm32 port has started. The development is done by Pavel Jancik, Michal Kebrt and Petr Stepan.

HelenOS 0.2.0.4 released.