HelenOS 0.8.0 has been released.
HelenOS is a portable microkernel-based multiserver operating system designed and implemented from scratch. It decomposes key operating system functionality such as file systems, networking, device drivers and graphical user interface into a collection of fine-grained user space components that interact with each other via message passing. A failure or crash of one component does not directly harm others. HelenOS is therefore flexible, modular, extensible, fault tolerant and easy to understand.
You can read the release notes to figure out what’s new and improved, and download this new release.
I tried running it in VMWare, but I’m having mouse issues severe enough to make it unusable. I’m going to check it out in qemu later though, including versions non-amd64 platforms.
Just for fun, tried to boot it up in the v86 javascript based emulator.
https://copy.sh/v86/
I uped the system ram to 1024MB and video ram to 32MB and loaded up the ia32 HeleneOS.ISO. I clicked “Start Emulation”, and low and behold it booted grub, then heleneos kernel, and eventually ended up at a command line. I’m not sure how one would get to a GUI? “help” listed some of the available commands. At this speed you can see every line print out, like being in front of a 9600 baud modem again, haha.
On the one hand it would be really awesome if all these osnews operating system articles could link to a virtual image that we could run in the browser to immediately play around with, but on the other hand it’d be hard to justify unless the performance could be improved by two orders of magnitude.
I had the same glitch in qemu – boots to GUI, mouse is wonky. After typing in a few things into the shell, moving the mouse caused it to recall the previous command and to move the text cursor (while the mouse cursor skipped around the screen in an unusable fashion).
I also tried the PowerPC and the Sparc64 versions in qemu.
The PowerPC boots to GUI, and while the barber pole animation runs, the mouse and keyboard generate no response. The Sparc64 (Ultra5/60) also boots to the GUI under qemu, but there is no animated barber pole, and the mouse and keyboard are also not responsive.
I have a build of QEMU built on my other laptop that is patched to emulate the Beagleboard XM, but it’s late and I don’t feel like messing with it further.
That kinda sucks. I am really curious about this. Maybe tomorrow I’ll toss it onto a USB stick and try it on actual hardware.
In terms of progress, this has left Minix3, HURD and others far behind.
Who is providing the impetus? This seems more than an experimental dabble so what is the niche area they are seeking to hit?
Would you care to expand on how it has left Minix3 far behind? I am not saying you are wrong, but it feels like Minix is a mature and complete OS
AFAIR Minix3 has very limited USB support and runs on a narrower range of hardware.
Honestly I wish all these o/s projects well (and have just volunteered to donate hardware to one). Am just wondering where the impetus behind this one comes from.
So how does it perform compared to a monolithic kernel?