Release Notes for HelenOS Trunk

Note: This is the draft for a future HelenOS release. As such it is a work in progress. The software described here has not been released yet. To get these latest and greatest features now, check out our SVN trunk. (But you will also get the latest bugs).

HelenOS version was released on date.

Features Introduced in This Release

General

• Multilingual text support
  • HelenOS now uses UCS as its primary representation for characters and UTF-8 as the primary string encoding, both in kernel and in user space. (With UTF-32 as an alternative for some special internal purposes).
• New string API
  • The kernel and user space use a new (non-standard) string API which allows convenient processing of UTF-8 strings.

Drivers

• Ramdisk driver
  • rd now uses an abstract block device interface
• New block device drivers
  • gxe_bd (for GXemul disk device)
  • ata_bd (for ATA disks simulated in Qemu)
  • file_bd (block device backed by a file)

File systems

• Support for multiple file systems mounted at once
• Support for stat() and fstat() file system calls
• New file systems
  • devfs file system for handling access to console via a file handle

Applications

• Tester
  • Tester is controlled by command-line arguments rather than being interactive.
• Tetris
  • Tetris now uses colors ^_^
  • Score table is now persistant
• Bdsh
  • Support for simple mv command
  • Support for simple mount command
• New applications
  • getvc

Miscellaneous

• Build system
  • Preconfigured defaults greatly simplify the process of configuring a HelenOS build

Regressions in This Release

• Mouse support on ia32 and amd64
  • Mouse support was temporarily removed from the i8042 driver due to code cleanup. A new mouse driver will be reintroduced in a near future release.

Known Bugs