Release Notes for HelenOS 0.7.0

HelenOS 0.7.0 (Parabolic Potassium) was released on April 4, 2017 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 0.6.0.

Special Notes for this Release

• This release represents the first step in the planned switch to the more agile bi-annual release cycle. 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 bi-annual 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

• Improved support for the sun4u machines
• Added basic support for user space paging
• Many bugs discovered and removed thanks to verification tools
• Improved dynamic linking
  • Dynamic linking is now enabled by default on ia32
• Improved the IPC abstractions by introducing interface types

Kernel

• The SYS_TLS_SET syscall for configuring thread-local storage has been removed in favor of user space-driven TLS management

Services and Drivers

• USB support revamped
  • Added support for USB 2.0
  • uhcirh driver removed as its functionality moved to uhci driver
• Intel HD Audio recording support (experimental)
• Completely new, unified partitioning architecture
  • Partitions are now enumerated automatically
  • fdisk utility replaces hdisk (vastly improved user experience, all changes are applied to running system state)

File Systems

• Many ext4 improvements and bug fixes

Networking

• Transport layer API was completely redesigned/reimplemented
  • Improved connection stability
  • No longer imitating BSD sockets
• Added basic support for Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) network devices and authentication methods

Applications

• sysinst prototype installer to install HelenOS on a hard disk

Libraries

• libmath expanded to cover all C89 math functions (only generic/non-optimized implementation), including single-precision variants from C99
• Optimizations of the heap memory allocator

Miscellaneous

• XCW (Cross Compiler Wrapper) tools
  • Can be used by out-of-tree application to cross-compile for HelenOS
  • The application is written against native HelenOS (non-libposix) environment
  • The application's build system is aware it is cross-compiling for HelenOS

Regressions in This Release

• Support for sparc32 machines (LEON3 CPU) has been removed due to the lack of proper maintenance (no hardware or easily accessible emulators avaiable)

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.