Release Notes for HelenOS mainline

Note: This document is a draft describing a future HelenOS release and is subject to change. The software described here has not been released yet. To get these latest and greatest features now, check out our Git master. (But you will also get the latest bugs).

HelenOS version (codename) was released on date.

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

Special Notes for this Release

Features Introduced in This Release

General

• New support for 96Boards' HiKey960 AArch64-based development board (first real arm64 platform)
• Enable I-cache and branch predictor on ARMv6 (Raspberry Pi) for better performance

Kernel

• Fix some bugs in zone merging algorithm

Services and Drivers

• Double-click is now supported (used in Navigator)
• Console now supports mouse input
  • When running in console mode (e.g. EGA or with window system disabled) the mouse can now be used
• EGA driver can now display any character from code page 437 (as opposed to just 7-bit ASCII)
• Serial console now outputs UTF-8 for non-ASCII characters instead of '?'
• Fixed mapping of blue color in serial console
• Raspberry Pi display driver can now detect the native display resolution and act accordingly

File Systems

Networking

Applications

• Added Navigator, a panel-based file manager
  • Currently allows only browsing directories and executing binaries
  • It uses libUI, but is text based at the moment (graphics mode to be added in the future)
• Calculator now has a menu
• GFX Demo now displays a status line with description for each demo screen
• Text Editor (/app/edit) was ported to libui (text mode)
  • It now has a menu and dialog windows

• Tetris now displays color in EGA text mode / serial console again
• Hello, Calculator and UI Demo now fully support text mode aside from graphics mode

Libraries

• GFX
  • A graphic context can now perform clipping
  • A graphic context can now control the hardware cursor
• User interface library
  • Added menu bar / menu
  • Added message dialog class (displays a message)
  • Added prompt dialog class (prompts user to enter a single line of text)
  • Added file dialog class
  • Text entry now actually supports entering text (and sets I-beam cursor)
  • Improved text-mode support (including color)
• C library
  • All device-related stuff that could be moved out of C library moved to new device library
• New code page library
  • Provides code page 437 encoding/decoding

Miscellaneous

• Cross-compiler is installed to $XDG_DATA_HOME/HelenOS/cross (i.e. $HOME/.local/share/HelenOS/cross) by default now (instead of /usr/local/cross)
• On PC platform we now configure serial port parameters for the serial console (38400,8,2.n) instead of relying on previous state

Regressions in This Release

• For the list of regressions since the previous release, see this report.
• Notable regressions

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.