wiki:ReleaseNotes/0.6.0

Version 3 (modified by Jakub Jermář, 10 years ago) ( diff )

Release Notes for HelenOS 0.6.0

HelenOS 0.6.0 (Elastic Horse) was released on December 12, 2014 and represents a major release with lots of new features and bug fixes.

This document contains a summary of changes made to HelenOS since release 0.5.0.

Special Notes for this Release

  • This release contains experimental support for several hardware platforms that weren't supported in the previous releases (or whose support was broken due to a lack of testing machines). Nevertheless it should be noted that the support for these platforms is still basic and not production-ready.
    • HelenOS/arm32 supports BeagleBoard XM, BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi
    • HelenOS/mips32 supports Malta
    • HelenOS/sparc32 supports LEON3
    • HelenOS/sparc64 support for sun4v machines has been partially revived

Features Introduced in This Release

General

  • GUI on platforms that provide a graphical framebuffer. A traditional TUI with multiple virtual consoles is provided on other platforms.
    • Note that the hot-key to activate the kernel debugging console has been changed to Pause / Break / F15.
  • Audio support
  • Networking has basic support for IPv6. IPv4 stack supports basic auto-configuration using DHCP.

Kernel

  • Tasks are allowed to terminate even if they have unanswered IPC messages
  • Support for guard pages
  • Support for large user stacks
  • Kernel serial driver for amd64, arm32/IntegratorCP and ia32
  • Scrollback support in the kernel debugging console

Services and Drivers

  • CMOS real time clock driver
  • Input driver for the isdv4 tablet
  • Sound Blaster 16 audio driver
  • Intel High Definition Audio driver
  • Driver for the Realtek 8169 and compatible Ethernet adapters
  • Mouse on IntegratorCP is now supported
  • Support for blink(1) RGB LEDs
  • The input server now supports Arabic keyboard layout.
  • Added Remote framebuffer protocol (a.k.a. VNC) server
  • Converted some drivers to DDF (ata_bd, pl050)

File Systems

  • The read-only ext2fs server was superseded by a more complete ext4fs server, with write support and some aspects of ext3 and ext4
  • Read-only UDF support in the new udf server
  • CDFS now supports the Joliet extension to ISO 9660 (Unicode long file names)
  • Display disk usage / free space information — df utility

Networking

  • nic utility to query and manipulate the state of the present NIC adapters
  • Initial IPv6 support
  • DNS host name resolution
  • Automatic network configuration via DHCP
  • SLIP protocol support
  • HTTP downloader tool download

Applications

  • bithenge
  • Added date command
  • Usability improvements of the edit command
  • Added untar utility (non-compressed tarballs only)
  • wavplay plays Wave Audio File format (.wav) files
  • modplay plays Amiga-style tracker modules (.mod, .xm)
  • Added barber as GUI activity indicator

Libraries

  • New automatically resizing hash table container type.
  • Userspace logging framework and logger.
  • printf() support for floating point numbers.

Miscellaneous

Fixed Logged Bugs & Enhancements

  • For the list of all logged defects fixed in this release, see this report.
  • For the list of all logged enhancements integrated in this release, see this report.

Known Bugs

  • For the list of regressions since the previous release, see this report.
  • For the list of known bugs still not fixed in this release, see this report.
  • For the list of all open tickets, see this report.
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