Release Notes for HelenOS 0.6.0

HelenOS 0.6.0 (Elastic Horse) was released on December 21, 2014 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 0.5.0.

Special Notes for this Release

• This release contains experimental support for several hardware platforms that weren't supported in the previous releases (or whose support was broken due to a lack of testing machines). Nevertheless it should be noted that the support for these platforms is still basic and not production-ready.
  • HelenOS/arm32 supports BeagleBoard-xM, BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi
  • HelenOS/mips32 supports Malta
  • HelenOS/sparc32 supports LEON3
  • HelenOS/sparc64 support for sun4v machines has been partially revived
• A preview of this release participated in the ​QEMU Advent Calendar 2014. There is a step-by-step tutorial to demonstrate the features of the preview, but it also applies to the release.

Features Introduced in This Release

General

• GUI on platforms that provide a graphical framebuffer. A traditional TUI with multiple virtual consoles is provided on other platforms.
  • Note that the hot-key to activate the kernel debugging console has been changed to Pause / Break / F15.
• Audio support
• Networking has basic support for IPv6. IPv4 stack supports basic auto-configuration using DHCP.

Kernel

• Tasks are allowed to terminate even if they have unanswered IPC messages
• Support for guard pages
• Support for large user stacks
• Kernel serial driver for amd64, arm32/IntegratorCP and ia32
• Scrollback support in the kernel debugging console

Services and Drivers

• CMOS real time clock driver
• Input driver for the isdv4 tablet
• Sound Blaster 16 audio driver
• Intel High Definition Audio driver
• Driver for the Realtek 8169 and compatible Ethernet adapters
• Mouse on IntegratorCP is now supported
• Support for blink(1) RGB LEDs
• The input server now supports Arabic keyboard layout.
• Added Remote framebuffer protocol (a.k.a. VNC) server
• Converted some drivers to DDF (ata_bd, pl050)

File Systems

• The read-only ext2fs server was superseded by a more complete ext4fs server, with write support and some aspects of ext3 and ext4
• Read-only UDF support in the new udf server
• CDFS now supports the Joliet extension to ISO 9660 (Unicode long file names)
• Display disk usage / free space information — df utility

Networking

• nic utility to query and manipulate the state of the present NIC adapters
• Initial IPv6 support
• DNS host name resolution
• Automatic network configuration via DHCP
• SLIP protocol support
• HTTP downloader tool download

Applications

• bithenge
• Added date command
• Usability improvements of the edit command
• Added untar utility (non-compressed tarballs only)
• wavplay plays Wave Audio File format (.wav) files
• modplay plays Amiga-style tracker modules (.mod, .xm)
• Added barber as GUI activity indicator

Libraries

• New automatically resizing hash table container type.
• Userspace logging framework and logger.
• printf() support for floating point numbers.

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.