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

Prominent Features

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

Applications

• Tester is controlled by command-line arguments rather than being interactive.
• Tetris now uses colors ^_^

Regressions in This Release

• Mouse support temporarily removed. This was too ugly. A new mouse driver will be reintroduced in a near future release.

Known Bugs