Release Notes for HelenOS 0.7.0

HelenOS 0.7.0 (Parabolic Potassium) was released on April 4, 2017 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 0.6.0.

Special Notes for this Release

This release represents the first step in the planned switch to the more agile bi-annual release cycle. HelenOS is still an experimental operating system at this point in time and support for many platforms and hardware devices is not production-ready. For the time being, the agile bi-annual release cycle might therefore produce releases that are slightly less "polished" in certain aspects, but it is also a driving force towards turning HelenOS into a production-ready operating system in the near future.

Features Introduced in This Release

General

Improved support for the sun4u machines

Added basic support for user space paging

Many bugs discovered and removed thanks to verification tools

Improved dynamic linking Dynamic linking is now enabled by default on ia32

Improved the IPC abstractions by introducing interface types

Kernel

The SYS_TLS_SET syscall for configuring thread-local storage has been removed in favor of user space-driven TLS management

Services and Drivers

USB support revamped Added support for USB 2.0 uhcirh driver removed as its functionality moved to uhci driver

Intel HD Audio recording support (experimental)

Completely new, unified partitioning architecture Partitions are now enumerated automatically fdisk utility replaces hdisk (vastly improved user experience, all changes are applied to running system state)



File Systems

Many ext4 improvements and bug fixes

Networking

Transport layer API was completely redesigned/reimplemented Improved connection stability No longer imitating BSD sockets

Added basic support for Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) network devices and authentication methods

Applications

sysinst prototype installer to install HelenOS on a hard disk

Libraries

libmath expanded to cover all C89 math functions (only generic/non-optimized implementation), including single-precision variants from C99

Optimizations of the heap memory allocator

Miscellaneous

XCW (Cross Compiler Wrapper) tools Can be used by out-of-tree application to cross-compile for HelenOS The application is written against native HelenOS (non-libposix) environment The application's build system is aware it is cross-compiling for HelenOS



Regressions in This Release

Support for sparc32 machines (LEON3 CPU) has been removed due to the lack of proper maintenance (no hardware or easily accessible emulators avaiable)

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