Release Notes for HelenOS 0.7.1

HelenOS 0.7.1 (Enlightened Zeal) was released on November 12, 2017.

This document contains a summary of changes made to HelenOS since release 0.7.0.

Special Notes for this Release

• HelenOS is still an experimental operating system at this point in time and support for many platforms and hardware devices is not production-ready. For the time being, the agile 6-month release cycle might therefore produce releases that are slightly less "polished" in certain aspects, but it is also a driving force towards turning HelenOS into a production-ready operating system in the near future.

Features Introduced in This Release

General

• This is the last release which uses the Bazaar version control system (VCS). Future releases will use Git.
• The system can again be built by clang for amd64

Kernel

• Basic support for capabilities
  • IPC phones have in fact been a sort of capabilities since the beginning. This work generalizes some of the IPC code to support more kernel object types.
  • IRQ structures are now managed using capabilities. It is no longer possible to unregister someone else's IRQ.
  • The limit of 64 IPC phones has been removed and is now virtually infinite.
• The kernel is now using the resizable hash table which has been already used in uspace since 2012.

Services and Drivers

• The naming service was converted to use the async framework
• CUDA driver was converted to the Device Driver Framework
• The interrupt controller drivers were converted to using the Device Driver Framework
• User can now unload an idle driver using devctl unload-drv
• Framebuffer now gets mapped only when actually used

File Systems

• All file system operations are relative to a specified node, client-side root
• Mountpoints are no longer stored in the filesystem servers, but in VFS
• Inbox mechanism for passing files from parent to a new child
• Client-side I/O cursors (file positions)
• Overhaul of the client interface; all APIs begin with the vfs_ prefix and can be used after including vfs/vfs.h
• Removal of some POSIX-ish headers and definitions
• File system probing
• Volume label support

Networking

• Lots of networking fixes in TCP, DNS and HTTP protocols
• TCP unit tests

Applications

• The pkg utility was added which allows installing packages from ​ci.helenos.org into a running instance of HelenOS

Libraries

• Effort towards greater C11 compliance and a cleaner cut between HelenOS-specific, C11 and POSIX code
• io/table module to print tabular output (used by devctl, inet).

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