HelenOS 0.2.0 has been released. “This release fixes many bugs and adds new functionality both to the kernel and userspace. The kernel now supports graceful task cleanup and the userspace layer was extended with framebuffer and console services. We also ported BSD tetris to demonstrate userspace capabilities of HelenOS. This is the first release with official documentation.”.
Can’t you be a little bit more creative? HelenOS? Why not JoeOS or BillOS?!
HelenOS 0.2.0 has been released.
That chirping sound you’re hearing is crickets.
That chirping sound you’re hearing is crickets.
I don’t like trolling, so I’m ashamed to admit that made me laugh and I modded it up for wit value.
You’re just lucky I have no idea what the hell HelenOS is, or I might be offended.
Yeah it was good for a chuckle. But as this is a OS-centtric website shouldn’t we be a little supportive when a new OS is released?
When I saw the name, it reminded me of the Young Ones skit of, “so, whats your name?”, “Promise you won’t laugh?”, “ok”, “its Helen” <hysterical laughter>
You know, this is not an offensive post. The fact that my post about this not being an offensive post is the twelfth post in twelve hours almost proves that this post isn’t meant to offend. This non-offensive post illustrates that HelenOS, as worthy as it may be, isn’t going to get the hot-fire that even AmigaOS, etc. get around here. Now, had he said something about how God-awful HelenOS was and called the devs a raving pack of idiots, that’s where I’d start modding down. So, Blixel, here’s to you. Had you posted this about Vista, you’d be at +5. Of course, I would have modded you down for “easy target”, but you’d have gained it back in spades.
+1 to you!
I’d never heard of this OS before. It supports SMP and quite a few architectures already. The kernel seems to be *really* well-written – some of the best code I’ve seen. Everything split up into architecture-dependent and generic code, with most code being generic.
If the developers carry on working on it (userspace, particularly), it could turn into something superb.
Edited 2006-06-11 02:14
You havn’t looked at the Plan 9 kernel – have you 😐
I hadn’t looked at Plan 9’s kernel before you mentioned it. I had a look just now, but what do you mean?
Compared to this HelenOS, it seems to be written by peopl who knew their task.
Sure HelenOS might look tidier and organized on the surface – but is boring, offers much much less functionallity based on the design/implementation it has.
Sure HelenOS might look tidier and organized on the surface – but is boring, offers much much less functionallity based on the design/implementation it has.
Well, the kernel seems to be fairly complete, even having the beginnings of capability-as-key security (though not, as far as I can see, applied to IPC). If the user-space functionality was there, it wouldn’t be at version 0.2
And having clean and well-organised source code is useful IMO, as it makes it easier to change things later.
Is the documentation page. I don’t know that much about OS design. But since it has been divided into sections, I can read through the documentation and looking at key words, I can do some further study.
Thanks HelenOS people.
Edited 2006-06-11 02:18
It looks good, but I’d like to see some userspace work
It would be interesting to try it beyond the lab or on a outside network, iirc the early linux kernel had many network bugs that Alan Cox found when he installed it on University of Wales, Swansea network.
The education in eastern europe is also to a very high standard, so we can expect this to be something great.
Hot-fire and AmigaOS in the same sentence?
-n-
You should have modded me down for “unlikely sentence construction”.
So I gave it a whirl… On my Dual Xeon box, I get to the kconsole prompt, but nothing I type shows up, so it looks like it’s not accepting any keyboard input from it. In vmware 4.5, it hangs either right after saying “This is init” or right after the PCI scan.
It looks like the console process gives each process that prints things its own virtual console. Whatever process prints something first will end up with the first console, and so that’s what will appear on the screen.
Poking around in the console process source, it looks like the F-keys display different consoles. F1-F5 on mine show different programs running. So try pressing those
By the way, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of user mode code yet (console, framebuffer, keyboard and that’s about it) so all you can do is play the little tetris game
but the kernel seems to do all the needed things, so I expect it to look more impressive by the next version. 
Oops, I didn’t see where you said it didn’t accept keyboard input. Never mind…
Since the Internet release, we have already identified several defects. One of them is related to the userspace console driver initialization as described on our errata page. We would be interested in you testing the current verision on your Dual Xeon box (and also in your rather old version of vmware):
http://www.helenos.eu/releases/helenos-20060611-p3-smp.iso.bz2
http://www.helenos.eu/releases/helenos-20060611-p3-up.iso.bz2
Do you think you can give it another shot?
If yes, please let us know through our mailing list.
Thanks. Jakub
Jakub,
I tried the new UP version in vmware and it worked. In fact, it’s clear that it worked previously. Apparently the first console just shows “This is init”, correct? The second shows the PCI configuration on the machine, etc?
I’ll try the SMP version when I get a chance. I have two SMP machines at my disposal (the dual xeon and a dual P3). I’ll give it a shot on both and report back on the mailing list.
Adam
Thanks for testing!
What you describe is the current userspace functionality except that the console binding is done on demand. Unfortunatelly, things that do most of the work are not visible (kernel and the userspace device drivers). We addded tetris and libpci so that people can see that HelenOS is kind of compatible with the rest of the world and actually does something. Note that you can switch back to the kernel console by pressing F12 and investigate the system a bit. Looking forward to hearing from you on the mailing list.
After iso image is booting (helenos-0.2.0-ia32.iso 2.0M) it start a tetris like game.
Not a joke – the kernel appears to be fairly complete, but not the user mode code. The tetris game must just be there to test it
But actually, the keyboard and screen drivers and tetris game are all in separate processes. So the tetris game working shows that multitasking is working and the kernel is working properly. (I think it just needs a few driver processes to be more useful.)