Release Notes for HelenOS Trunk

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 Bazaar head. (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 0.4.1.

Special Notes for this Release

Text.

Features Introduced in This Release

General

• The project switched to Bazaar VCS.
• The ia32 port can be run in VirtualBox again.
• Experimental support for building using Clang.

Kernel

• Item

Services and Drivers

• ATA Disk Driver
  • Now works with real disks and supports 48-bit LBA.
• Added MBR and GUID partition table drivers.
• On G3 Macs keyboard works again via new Apple Desktop Bus driver (and mouse is also supported).
• Re-introduced mouse drivers, this time as separate servers.
  • PS/2 mouse
  • Apple ADB mouse
• Clipboard service

File Systems

• Improved I/O error handling.
• The FAT file system is now more robust against malformed on-disk file system data.
• The DEVFS file system now understands device namespaces and moves to hierarchical directory structure.
• TMPFS and FAT file systems can now be unmounted.

Applications

• New Text Editor
  • Added edit, a simple text editor.
• Bdsh
  • Improved command input (text seek, history, copy and paste)
  • mkfile command for creating zero-filled files (e.g. disk images)
• Tool for creating FAT file systems, mkfat

Miscellaneous

• Build system
  • Parallel builds are now supported.
• Spawned task now inherits the current working directory from the spawner task.
• Stack traces
  • Upon a failed assertion the failing application will print a stack trace (all architectures except ia64 and mips32).
  • When the kernel kills a task, it will print its stack trace (all architectures except ia64, mips32, ppc32 and sparc64).
  • When the kernel panics, it will print a stack trace (all architectures except ia64, mips32, ppc32 and sparc64).

Regressions in This Release

• Item
  • Description

Known Bugs

• For the known bugs, please see the ​list of defects logged for the next releases.