Release Notes for HelenOS 0.9.1

HelenOS 0.9.1 (Armonia) was released on May 11, 2019.

This document contains a summary of changes made to HelenOS since release 0.8.0.

Special Notes for this Release

This release brings support for a new 64-bit architecture and improves usability of HelenOS on several already supported platforms. It also extends support for dynamic linking to more architectures.

This release brings a small change in the version numbering scheme. Since there are two releases per year, the first one is 0.<YEAR-2010>.1 and the second one is 0.<YEAR-2010>.2. Note that the agile bi-annual release cycle might 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.

General

• Dynamic linking is now supported and enabled by default on amd64, arm32, ppc32 and sparc64 (in addition to previous support on ia32)

• Support for the MIPS Malta machine was improved by enabling serial console input/output both in the kernel console and also for the user interface.

• Support for arm64 architecture (AArch64) was added. The port can run on the QEMU ARM Virtual Machine.

Kernel

• Support for serial console on the sparc64/sun4u machine was improved by enabling it in the kernel in addition to the already enabled support in the user interface.

Services and Drivers

• New specialized utility pci for listing PCI devices
  • Plus corresponding backend support in the PCI driver

• Added driver for virtio-blk block devices. Use -hdd virtio-blk to enable in QEMU. So far this works only on ia32 and amd64.

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.