Home

About


News

Screenshots

Download


Developers

OS Development

Search

 


VERSION 0.68
10/05/2007

Overview: This is a maintenance release, with a focus on disk I/O performance (fixed the kernel's disk cache, and added IDE lookahead and write caching), secure deletion (shredding) of files/partitions/disks, and bug fixes, including important changes to the OS loader resulting in more reliable booting on more systems.

  • Re-implemented the kernel's disk caching. Previously, performance was generally bad but could be horrendous under heavy I/O, as well as evidence that it was buggy and could occasionally cause data corruption.
  • Added read caching (lookahead) and write caching ability to the IDE disk driver. Write caching necessitated a flush() disk driver function to be called from the higher-level sync() function.
  • In the Disk Manager, turned off software disk caching when doing a disk copy operation; vastly improves I/O throughput for faster copies.
  • Implemented new A20 address line code in the 'vloader' OS loader, for successful booting on more systems. New A20 enabling methods include a BIOS call and a write to port 92h.
  • Implemented secure deletion of disk data with a kernelDiskEraseSectors() function that does passes of overwriting the raw disk sectors. Added an 'erase' operation to the Disk Manager to enable this for partitions and whole disks.
  • Implemented secure deletion for files, which does passes of overwriting the file data. Added a command line option to the 'rm' command to invoke it.
  • Reorganized some of the malloc() code and added debugging output.
  • Added logic to the malloc() code (used both the kernel and user programs) for deallocating heap memory when it is no longer being used, rather than keeping it all indefinitely. Each block now keeps a record of its allocation, and when the whole allocation is unused it is freed.
  • Updated some partition tag descriptions in the kernel disk code (will show up primarily in the Disk Manager).
  • Added a '-R' option to the 'cp' program for recursive directory copying.
  • Added regular write-protect checking to the floppy driver, so that by the time a filesystem is mounted we should already know if we can't write to it.
  • The kernelDevice for system memory now contains an attribute with the memory size. Viewable from the 'lsdev' (Devices) program.
  • Removed the kernelDiskSyncDisk() function, made kernelDiskSync() a call for specific disks, and added a kernelDiskSyncAll() function for syncing all the disks.
  • Add a kernelDiskGetStats() function for getting disk performance data, and add that info to the Program Manager's display.
  • Added a set of software flags to the 'disk' and 'kernelDisk' structures to indicate changeable things like media state, door state, read-only, 'sync' flag, etc. The previous 'flags' fields was really an indication of the hardware type, so was changed to a 'type' field.
  • - Added a kernelDiskSetFlags() function to allow changing user-settable values in the new flags field, and added a DISKFLAG_NOCACHE flag to disable the software cache for the disk.
  • Added the optional-argument-option support to the getopt() C library function.
  • Added a "file ops" test to the test program.
  • Added a basic "disk I/O" test to the test program.
  • Removed the redundant vshCopyFile() function from the vsh library.
  • Fixed: The floppy disk version was too full, crashed during boot when it subsequently couldn't write log files, etc., and otherwise spewed too many error messages.
  • Fixed: When an IDE disk had a small multi-sector value like 16, reading large files could fail with an error message about too many PRD entries.
  • Fixed: In the Disk Manager, when NTFS resizing failed (for example with the unclean journal message) control didn't return - it just hung.
  • Fixed: With large IDE disks, on some systems, the kernel seemed to be getting 28-bit-limited geometry and size values from the BIOS. The IDE driver replaces BIOS values with ones from the device/controller wherever the BIOS values make more sense.
  • Fixed: Doing a 'full' Visopsys install on a ~80mb partition, after choosing to format as FAT16, could totally crash/hang the system.
  • Fixed: The mouse was leaving tracers at the rightmost and bottommost edges of the screen (1 pixel width).
  • Fixed: The kernelFileCopy() function now allocates memory for its copy buffer using kernelMemoryGet() rather then kernelMalloc().
  • Fixed: Most of the file system data allocated in the FAT filesystem driver was not deallocated, simply discarded.
  • Fixed: The kernelFileCopyRecursive() function caused a page fault when it encountered an empty directory.
  • Fixed: Though the Disk Manager's 'move partition' and 'copy disk/partition' progress indicators would show the correct time, but the percentage could overflow. going back to a smaller number and then climbing again.

VERSION 0.67
03/04/2007

Overview: This is a maintenance release, including a number of bug fixes and the addition of new capabilities to the IDE disk driver including PCI, DMA, and 48-bit addressing support; a significant re-engineering of the Disk Manager program to modularize it for new disk label types, plus support for moving logical partitions and creating 'preceding' logical partitions.

  • Added PCI, DMA, and 48-bit addressing support to the IDE disk driver.
  • Did some touchups and corrections to the Visopsys IO code in the libntfs library.
  • Implemented the ability to move logical partitions in the Disk Manager.
  • Implemented the ability to create 'preceding' logical partitions in the Disk Manager.
  • Modularized the Disk Manager so that it will be better suited for working with different types of disk labels.
  • Added a debug_io category to the kernelDebug.c functions.
  • Added itoux() and lltoux() pseudo- C library functions for printing unsigned hexadecimal strings.
  • Commands specified for menu items in the desktop configuration file are now checked to make sure they exist.
  • Corrected the '%p' specifier printf() and family format strings, so that it is printed as an unsigned value.
  • Cleaned up new compilation warnings generated by GCC 4.1.1.
  • Fixed: Lines of only whitespace in configuration files used by the kernel configuration reader/writer functions halted processing.
  • Fixed: Launching a new window failed to reset the global "focused component" until the mouse was moved.
  • Fixed: When a process was killed, the text input stream's 'echo' attribute was not being reset.
  • Fixed: The FAT filesystem driver's "get unused clusters" function was not properly returning an error if no free clusters were found.
  • Fixed: In the Disk Manager, using the cursor keys in the disk list or partition list did not change the selection.
  • Fixed: The kernel's GUID generation routine could hang because it was using an uninitialized lock structure.
  • Fixed: When creating a new logical partition in between two others, the Disk Manager didn't set the disk order correctly.
  • Fixed: IDE disk driver now properly checks for sector number overflow.  Previously it could fail to detect attempts at >28-bit addressing, causing overflow at the ~130GB mark.
  • Fixed: A bug in the 'lsdev' program printing devices when the number of attributes was less than 2.
  • Fixed: The progress dialog didn't layout properly when resized, and also fixed the layout of a few dialogs and windows vis. resizing.
  • The Disk Manager's progress dialogs that show time remaining no longer zero-pad the values, and specify the time in "X hours X minutes" format.

VERSION 0.66
01/02/2007

Overview: This is a maintenance release, featuring the ability to resize Windows Vista partitions, more reliable loading on various systems, better exception handling, color text in graphics mode, improvements to the C library, and a number of bug fixes.

  • Ported ntfsprogs 1.13.1 (including ntfsresize 1.13.1.1) so that the Disk Manager can successfully resize Windows Vista NTFS partitions.
  • Modified the vloader OS loader so that it only uses int 15 to move data into high memory. Improves reliability of loading on more systems.
  • The exception handler is now a separate task, for proper debugging and better reliability (in case of stack corruption, etc)
  • Implemented proper color text output in both text and graphics modes.
  • The boot sector code was further groomed and streamlined, though the work highlighted a bug in the GRUB bootloader that will always prevent chain-loading Visopsys from the second hard disk.
  • The MBR bootmenu code no longer has the number of sectors to load hardcoded into it. It now reads a tracks' worth. Also changed some of the memory locations used, since there might have been conflicts there.
  • Improved the Disk Manager's confirmation/warning message before resizing a partition.
  • When the progress dialog's 'Cancel' button is disabled, the mouse cursor shows 'busy'.
  • In the Disk Manager, progress indicator more accurately represents the actual times of the different stages of an NTFS resize.
  • In the Disk Manager, the "Resetting $Logfile" portion of an NTFS resize shows progress indication.
  • The kernel now accepts relative pathnames to file-related API functions.  Removed all the absolute path hand-waving from programs, libs, etc.
  • Implemented the family of scanf() C library functions, including fscanf(), sscanf(), vfscanf(), vscanf(), and vsscanf().
  • Added the C library functions_num2str(), _numdgts(), and _str2num().  Removed the custom atoi(), itoa(), itob(), itox(), lltoa(), lltob(), lltox(), ulltoa(), utoa(), and xtoi() functions and made them all macros in <stdlib.h> using the 3 new functions, above.
  • Added realpath() and strnlen() C library functions.
  • Added the C library functions basename() and dirname(), and removed the kernel API function fileSeparateLast().
  • Removed the custom C library functions _div64(), _divdi3(),_moddi3(), _udivdi3(), and_umoddi3(). We now use the libgcc versions.
  • The GUI "menu bar" component is no longer a container. It now *has* a container, so that it can also have state information about which menu is visible. Previously, raising a right-click menu in the Disk Manager could cause the corresponding menu bar title to draw itself raised when it shouldn't.
  • It is now possible to 'focus' the root window (without it going over top of the other windows, obviously).
  • Fixed: FAT32 bug in which the vloader OS loader was looking for the wrong terminating cluster number.
  • Fixed: When a window was bigger than the screen dimensions, moving the left side of it off the screen, then moving the mouse around the right side of the window caused mouse tracers (and perhaps a GUI crash).
  • Fixed: Dragging the 'imgboot' window off the left side of the screen caused a system crash.
  • Fixed: When a list component is disabled, the list items no longer appear greyed-out.
  • Fixed: If the 'iconwin' program can't find the icon, it will try to use the standard 'executable' one instead of the generic visopsys one.
  • Fixed: The 'iconwin' program could still show an icon for a program that wasn't available. Also changed the config file format so that a list of icon names is not required to be specified before the individual specs
  • Fixed: In text mode, the 'more' command could leave its reverse characters on the last line if you're scrolling with any other key than [space].
  • Fixed: Printing a legitimately-escaped format sequence such as %%d in user space using printf() and friends didn't work, as the kernel's print routines would try to format their input again.
  • Fixed: The C library memcmp function was comparing one too many bytes.
  • Fixed: When the text was a different color (such as an error) and the screen scrolled, the cursor could remain the color of the previous line.
  • Fixed: When booting from a CD there was an error message:
    Error:kernel process:kernelFile.c:fileCreate(614):
    Filesystem is read-only.
  • Fixed: Broken CD-ROM emulation was not recognized on some systems.

VERSION 0.65
17/12/2006

Overview: This is a maintenance release, with particular focus on the Disk Manager program, the USB subsystem, and the GUI. The Disk Manager can now copy and paste partitions, cancel partition move operations, format user-specified FAT subtypes, and has more user-friendly partition type selection.

  • Re-engineered the kernel's USB subsystem and UHCI host controller driver and re-enabled basic USB support by default.
  • Implemented per-window mouse pointers, so that applications can set them appropriately according to whatever they're doing without affecting anything else.
  • The Disk Manager can now copy and paste partitions, on the same disk or disk-to-disk.
  • The Disk Manager's "move partition" operation now allows the user to press the 'Cancel' button as long as no data from the original partition location has (yet) been overwritten.
  • Formatting FAT filesystems using the Install or Disk Manager programs now allows the user to specify a FAT filesystem subtype (default, FAT12, FAT16, FAT32).
  • The Disk Manager's "list types" and "set type" dialogs now display the partition types in a clickable list box selection; The user no longer has to type a hex code to set the type.
  • Added the ability to do FPU state saves and restores (with help from Davide Airaghi <davide.airaghi@gmail.com> and Greg <reqst@o2.pl>).
  • Added a global window manager variable list.
  • Added "mouse enter" and "mouse exit" events for windows.
  • Added fopen(), fclose(), and strcasestr() C library functions.
  • Created a proper test suite harness program. Initial tests implemented are for text output, port I/O protection, floating-point, and some GUI operations.
  • Code improvements to the implementation of window component levels.
  • The generic window component now has some container functions built in, such as layout(), numComps(), flatten(), and setBuffer(), so that all 'composite' components that contain others can have their sub-components participate in various actions.
  • The processing of window events no longer tries to determine the precise component the event happened to -- instead events are now cascaded down through any/all applicable containers, components, subcomponents, etc. Added an eventComp() function to window components so that they can specify whether they want some sub-component to receive a particular event, otherwise it goes to the component itself by default.
  • Added a little removeFromContainer() inline function for removing components from their parent container.
  • The floppy disk driver now does better memory management of its list of disks, devices, driver data, etc.
  • Fixed: Divide-by-zero fault in the kernel's random number code, caused by any call to the rand() C library function.
  • Fixed: The 'cat' and 'more' commands were crashy.
  • Fixed: Closing the Command Window program could occasionally cause system crashes.
  • Fixed: Booting could fail (system crash) when the (FAT) root filesystem was nearly full.
  • Fixed: A bug in the Disk Manager's format() function was preventing it from offering the choice 'none' (clobber).
  • Fixed: Creating logical partitions in the Disk Manager could cause page fault exceptions when writing the changes.
  • Fixed: Formatting a too-large disk as FAT12 caused a divide-by-zero fault.
  • Fixed: Clicking on a context menu item that didn't fall within the bounds of its parent window had no effect.
  • Fixed: When resizing the Disk Manager window, the partition diagram didn't completely redraw its entire width.
  • Fixed: When the Display Settings program was used to set the global colors, there were some window components whose colors were changing incorrectly including icons, lists, and menu items/list items.
  • Fixed: When changing a variable in the Configuration Editor, clicking OK caused remnants of the selected item to be erroneously drawn at the top of the window.

VERSION 0.64
25/10/2006

Overview: This is a maintenance release, with extensive code grooming and bug fixes. There has been a particular focus on the GUI code, kernel debugging, the kernel API, gcc 4.x warnings, and compiler optimization problems. New user-visible features include the addition of right-click context menus and support for 32-bit bitmaps and icons.

  • Booting now works under the Bochs 2.3 emulator (failed in graphics mode under earlier versions)
  • Implemented right-click context menus.
  • Added support for 32-bit .bmp bitmap images and .ico icons
  • The Disk Manager's canvas now responds to keyboard cursor inputs.
  • Did general, large-scale GUI re-engineering.
  • Fixed compilation errors under gcc 4.x
  • Added some API debugging
  • Moved the sysCall() inline function into a _syscall.c file to avoid problems with gcc (optimization) function inlining.
  • Dialog windows no longer appear in the window shell's window list.
  • Multitasking/scheduling changes: Separated out the scheduler's code for choosing the next program to run (into a subroutine), corrected the big comment that describes the scheduling algorithm, fixed a bug that might have resulted in a NULL pointer dereference, made it so the exception handler is never interrupted by another process, and added a kernelProcessingException variable that exports the exception number being processed.
  • Implemented a generic kernel debugging functionality that can be compiled in conditionally, and that can filter messages by categories (for example, there is a category for GUI debugging and a category for USB debugging), as well as filtering by source file.
  • Disabled USB support for now, since it's broken and can cause some boots to hang
  • The window border component only ever drew when it was called to draw the top border, since it could only draw the entire border. Now the 'draw gradient border' function can draw individual lines of a border and the border component draws the parts individually.
  • Did some cleanup of the vloader OS loader code
  • Added a function to redraw all the windows, and another one that resets all of the (non-custom) colors of all the windows' components. Setting the colors in the 'Display Settings' program uses this to change all of the window colors immediately.
  • Added more debugging info to errors in the malloc() code.
  • Added a userspace flag for components that aren't focusable by default. Subsequently, 'canvas' components are no longer focusable by default.
  • Creating window menus is now done more simply by passing a structure with the list of menu items, then calling the getSelected() function to find out which one was clicked. Also implemented the more-useful getData() function, which returns the objectKey of the selected item.
  • Implemented a window 'slider' component to wrap the scroll bar component, so that it can be focusable and accept keyboard input. (And adapted the window library color chooser dialog to use it).
  • Window canvas components now show a visual change when they are focused.
  • GUI menu components now have their own graphic buffers, so that regardless of what window they come from they can stay on top, extend outside the window, etc.
  • The install.sh script now copies any /bootinfo or /grphmode files into the CD-ROM boot floppy images.
  • The install/imaging scripts no longer redirect useful error output to /dev/null -- they now redirect to temporary log files, check exit codes, and direct the user to the log files if applicable.
  • The window manager code now has more efficient memory management, so that it isn't allocating memory for the entire array of possible window structures at initialization time.
  • Created a top-level Makefile.include file for all the code Makefiles, added some more warning flags to it, and fixed the resulting warnings.
  • Made gcc optimization args (-00, -02, etc) a global Makefile variable
  • The objectKey type is now a 'volatile void *'
  • Made data structures throughout properly self-referential (instead of using void * pointers) and removed all of the unnecessary casting, for (hopefully) fewer coding errors.
  • Fixed: The vloader OS loader was being written to the *second* free cluster by the Fedora VFAT driver when not using FAT32. Made a hack to adjust it when installing from Fedora, and generally streamlined the copy-boot program.
  • Fixed: A slight bug in the FAT code in that it relied too strictly on the Microsoft definition of FAT-type detection. Now it takes into account a couple of extra hints.
  • Fixed: The 'view' program wasn't showing tab characters properly in text files.
  • Fixed: The 'vsh' shell would crash if the user entered a line containing only whitespace.
  • Fixed: A bug in the copyArea() function of the framebuffer graphic driver in that it wasn't checking to see whether the areas were outside the buffer.

VERSION 0.63
15/08/2006

Overview: This is a maintenance and bugfix release, with numerous small tweaks throughout the entire system. New features include the ability to format and resize Linux swap partitions, more reliable OS loading, more detailed CPU detection, and a simple text editor.

  • Added formatting and resizing support for Linux swap partitions.
  • Added a basic, simple text editor (currently only works in graphics mode).
  • The OS loader now does improved memory moves to high memory for better reliability on more systems.
  • Added improved CPU detection to the kernel 'system' driver.
  • Added the beginnings of a 32-bit BIOS driver.
  • The file list widget and the file dialog have been reworked so that they don't use a separate GUI thread, since that was unreliable and crashy.
  • GUI applications can now enable click-driven cursor movements in text areas.
  • Removed the hard limit on the maximum number of window components.
  • The kernel now records and uses a network domain name, both via DHCP and via the kernel's config file.
  • There are now kernel functions to get and set the host and domain names, as well as UNIX-style command line functions.
  • Added a kernelSystemInfo() function, similar to the UNIX 'uname' syscall.
  • Added a variable list of text-string attributes to all hardware device structures.
  • The window 'component parameters' structure now has a 'flags' field to be used for all boolean values.
  • Added getWidth() and getHeight() functions for fonts.
  • Text screen saving and restoring now uses caller-supplied pointers instead of storing a single instance in kernel memory.
  • Added a text API function to enable or disable screen scrolling.
  • Window resize events now go into the window's event stream so that applications can catch them.
  • The scrollbar slider now has a minimum size, so that it's clickable even when there's lots of data to scroll through.
  • The makefile variables for $CC, etc., are now settable from the top-level makefile.
  • The 'ldd' program was really more like an 'nm' program, so it was renamed.
  • Fixed: PS/2 mouse driver synchronization problems on some systems.
  • Fixed: The Disk Manager's 'set type' menu item was failing to bring up the dialog.
  • Fixed: After resizing a filesystem, the Disk Manager no longer shows the warning "Can't write partition table backup in read-only mode" (if booted from a CD, for example). This just scared people.
  • Fixed: When entering the filesystem resizing value in the Disk Manager's text mode, it didn't allow you to append 'c' or 'm' for size in cylinders or megabytes.
  • Fixed: The Disk Manager no longer continually pesters users about incorrect CHS values in partition entries; one 'no' answer now turns it off.
  • Fixed: The FAT filesystem driver now ensures that items it's processing (when it's constructing short filenames, or writing directories) belong to its own filesystem (as opposed to mount points for other filesystems, for example).
  • Fixed: If the 'imgboot' program's config files contained commands with arguments, the icons weren't shown because the program didn't separate off the arguments and therefore couldn't locate the commands.
  • Fixed: Using the 'view' program to view a really small or really large image caused GUI crashiness.

VERSION 0.62
24/04/2006

Overview: This is a maintenance release.  Some new features include basic USB controller support, a USB mass-storage driver, device hotplugging, Qemu support, loading of RLE encoded bitmaps, a 'programs' icon, and 'minesweeper' and 'snake' games.

  • Implemented basic USB support for UHCI controllers.
  • Implemented a SCSI driver that can support USB mass storage devices.
  • Added basic hot-plugging support for devices.
  • Added support in the image functions for loading RLE encoded bitmaps.
  • Added a 'programs' icon.
  • Added 'minesweeper' and 'snake' games.
  • Added an icon for Bauer Vladislav's calendar program.
  • Implemented a proper kernelBus top-level infrastructure for use by the PCI driver, USB driver, etc.
  • The display devices and text console drivers are now initialized separately and before other hardware, so that hardware detection messages can be shown while detection is going on.
  • The 'computer' program now continuously scans for new disks.
  • The 'shutdown' command now has a command-line flag for rebooting, and the 'shutdown' and 'reboot' commands now have command-line flags for ejecting the boot media, if applicable.
  • The 'iconwin' and 'filebrowse' programs now change the mouse pointer when they're busy loading up a file or program.
  • The 'iconwin' program now continues silently when programs or icons specified in the config file are missing.
  • The boot menu now has a default selection and timeout period (settable by the 'bootmenu' program).
  • There is now an 'active menu' global window system variable so that the focused menu can always be on top, and always go away then it loses focus.
  • Fixed: Booting failed on Qemu due to a PS/2 mouse driver hang.
  • Fixed: The 'bootmenu' program failed to run from a read-only media.
  • Fixed: The boot menu timer was counting down too quickly.
  • Fixed: The 'install' program failed if a directory it wanted to create already existed.
  • Fixed: The 'defrag' program was giving "can't defrag filesystem type 'unknown'" messages for things like floppies that hadn't been mounted.
  • Fixed: The kernelDiskGetMediaState() function was returning 0 for flash disks

VERSION 0.61
26/01/2006

Overview: This is a maintenance release. Some new features include Disk Manager support for resizing NTFS filesystems and arbitrary partitions, purely unprivileged user-space processes, I/O port permissions and protection, IDE block mode I/O, Linux swap detection and clobber, improved atomic kernel locks, many C library additions, and a calendar program, in addition to assorted bug fixes.

  • The Disk Manager can now resize Windows XP (NTFS) partitions, as a result of porting Linux ntfsprogs NTFS resizing code.
  • The Disk Manager will now allow partition-only resizing regardless of the filesystem type (with appropriate warnings).
  • All userspace programs now run in unprivileged CPU mode, regardless of actual privilege level, and I/O privilege maps have been implemented by Davide Airaghi.
  • Improved IDE/ATA hard disk driver performance by implementing block-mode I/O.
  • Added basic 'stub' NTFS filesystem support (detection and clobber).
  • Added basic 'stub' Linux swap filesystem support (detection and clobber).
  • The kernel's locking code now implements real atomic locking.
  • Added Bauer Vladislav's calendar program.
  • All threads now use the same page directory control data as their process parents for better synchronization.
  • Process stacks now have guard pages at the top which are privileged, so that user process stack overflows cause protection faults.
  • The C library now has a proper suite of malloc() functionality -- taken from the kernel's implementation -- which is now used by the kernel instead so it can be used for user space without code duplication.
  • Added a kernelMemoryBlockInfo() function to return information about an allocated memory block. Useful for the realloc() libc function.
  • Added a kernel disk function for rescanning the partitions of a single disk.
  • Added a lock to the 'progress' data structure.
  • Implemented 'confirmation' capability in the progress structure and the libvsh and libwindow progress bar/dialog functions.
  • Add a kernel filesystem function for getting statistics about a filesystem (whether it's mounted or not, or indeed, properly supported or not).
  • Added a kernel filesystem function for getting resizing constraints.
  • Added a kernel filesystem function for requesting specific detection of filesystem type (useful for removable media and such).
  • The text-mode installer now offers to let you partition first.
  • The text mode Disk Manager now show the operations/commands in two columns.
  • Added a window library 'radio dialog' for presenting choices in a radio button format.
  • The Disk Manager's 'move partition' and 'copy disk' functions now uses standard progress dialogs and show time estimates.
  • The kernel logging thread now has a lock on the log, so that the log doesn't get garbled by different processes logging at the same time.
  • The OS loader's screen output is now saved in a file (/system/vloader.log) so that it can be examined afterwards.
  • Removed the source code from the ISO distribution.
  • Printf()-style C library functions now support left-justification ('-') format specifiers.
  • Added C library functions lltoa(), lltob(), lltox(), and ulltoa() to support 'long' format specifiers and arguments.
  • Added C library functions mbstowcs(), mbtowc(), and wctomb() for wide-character support.
  • Added C library functions fflush(), ffs(), fgets(), realloc(), strdup(), strerror(), vfprintf(), vprintf(), vsnprintf(), and vsprintf().
  • Added C library functions for 64-bit divisions such as __div64(), __divdi3(), __moddi3(), etc.
  • Enabled the C library functions such as fgetpos(), fread(), fsetpos(), fflush(), fgets(), ftell(), fprintf(), fseek() and fwrite() (as applicable) to behave correctly when the FILE* stream is 'stdin', 'stdout', or 'stderr'.
  • Added C library header files endian.h, stdint.h, and <sys/cdefs.h>.
  • Fixed: After formatting FAT32, Linux and older Windows installers would show the filesystem as 100% full.
  • Fixed: Errors with IDE/ATA hard disks as secondary masters.
  • Fixed: Unformatting (clobbering) a partition in the disk manager didn't seem to convince the kernel to un-detect the previous filesystem until reboot.
  • Fixed: The graphical 'ifconfig' program wasn't updating the device text after starting/stopping networking.
  • Fixed: The wallpaper program was not properly shutting down its window thread.
  • Fixed: The imgboot program failed to exit after calling the login program.
  • Fixed: There was a (harmless) error message when running the 'ldd' program against an executable program because it always tried to load the file as a library.

VERSION 0.6
30/11/2005

Overview: This release introduces a host of new functionality including a cleaned up desktop with icons for browsing the computer, file systems, and administrative tasks, FAT defragmenting, ELF dynamic linking, a built in chain-boot loader and simple MBR formatting, file browsing widgets and dialogs, Windows .ico icon file support, a generic file viewing program, Italian keyboard support, new icons and a new splash screen.

  • Added a 'Computer' icon, equivalent to the one in Linux or 'My Computer' in Windows.  It shows the different disks, auto-mounts them (if applicable) when clicked, and launches a file browser.
  • Added a 'File Browser' icon.
  • Added an 'Administration' icon which brings up a window for various other programs that were previously on the default desktop.
  • The 'view' program is now a more generic program for default viewing of various sorts of files.
  • Added defragmenting capability to the FAT filesystem driver.
  • Implemented shared libraries and dynamically linked executables.  All included libraries and programs are now dynamic.
  • Implemented a simple, chain-loading MBR boot menu for loading from different partitions and operating systems.  The 'bootmenu' program lets the user edit the menu strings and set parameters.  Also accessible from the Disk Manager.  ** Note that this will NOT load any Linux installation
    that uses an initrd.
  • Implemented simple MBR code, so that for example the Disk Manager can be used to rescue a system from a deleted or corrupt GRUB installation.
  • Added .ico icon file format support and converted many existing icons to that format.
  • Created file browsing widgets/dialogs.
  • There is a new splash screen image and a number of new icons.
  • Text areas now use white background and blue text as the default colors.
  • Added Davide Airaghi's Italian keyboard mapping.
  • Some preliminary networking support has been added, but for the moment it is disabled by default.  The only network device driver provided is for the "Lance" (AMD PC-NET) card, which can be simulated under VMWare.  In the 'Administration' window, there is now a 'Network' icon that proves access to a simple 'Network Devices' program which, for now, just shows devices, status, settings, dynamic (via DHCP) IP address, etc.  There is also a 'ping' command.
  • The new exception handler prints out more diagnostic information (exception type, and more)
  • There is now a vsh library function for a text mode progress bar.
  • The format program now shows a progress bar in text mode.
  • The Disk Manager will refuse outright, or warn/confirm before moving, formatting, or deleting mounted partitions.
  • The 'disks' command now shows mount points.
  • Created an 'iconwin' program that uses config files to create custom windows with icons, and user-specified actions associated with them.
  • Added a /CREDITS.txt file for listing others' contributions.
  • There is now a /system/mouse/ directory for mouse pointer images, a /system/config/ directory for .conf files of all programs and the kernel, a /system/mount directory for automatic mounting, and a /system/wallpaper directory for background images.
  • Created a 'progress dialog' window library feature that utilizes the 'progress' structure and shows a progress bar and status messages.
  • The exception handler is no longer a standalone task, in order to do FPU state saves/restores without setting the CR0[TS] bit.
  • Handles exceptions generated when a process attempts to do floating point operations after a task switch.
  • The filesystem structure is now contained within the logical disk structure.
  • The user-space 'disk' object now indicates whether a partition is mounted, and if so, the mount point.
  • Exported a portion of the kernelDevice structure as a new 'device' structure, and created API functions to export the hardware device tree.
  • 'Atomized' some of the ASM macros in kernelProcessorX86.h so that they can be reused in other more complex macros
  • Added floorf(), sin(), cos(), and tan() functions to the C lib.
  • Added support for %b format specifiers in the _xpndfmt.c functions by adding another bogus C library routine (itob).
  • File changes: Changed 'kernelMiscFunctions.*' to 'kernelMisc.*', and the kernelPageManager and kernelMemoryManager have had the 'Manager' bit taken out of their file/function names.
  • Added window library functions to clear an event handler and to get the window thread PID
  • Implemented a 'progress' data structure that can be passed to (for example) long filesystem operations such as format, check, resize.
  • The 'map to free' functionality of the paging code no longer, by default, allocates the first page in the address space.  This makes it easier to detect/guide against NULL pointer dereferences.
  • Got rid of the 'diskType' and 'mediaType' enums from the various disk structures, and instead use a set of logical flags to describe disks.
  • Removed the deprecated windowPack() and windowSetPacked() API functions.
  • Fixed: In the Disk Manager, canceling a new partition creation at the label type stage caused 2 changes to show as pending.
  • Fixed: The Disk Manager's partition reordering menu didn't display changes properly in text mode.  It worked but the changes weren't reflected in the menu.
  • Fixed: The lost+found directory created by the EXT2 formatting code was not readable when we mounted the filesystem.  Also, the permissions are now set to the same values as Linux mke2fs.
  • Fixed: Using the 'gcc version 3.4.2' and 'ld version 2.15.92.0.2' combo (Fedora Core 3), generated programs had a new, unexpected number (3) of ELF program header entries.
  • Fixed: Selecting partition/list types in the Disk Manager could crash the program.
  • Fixed: The Program Manager was associating some child threads with the wrong parents in the process list.

VERSION 0.58
03/10/2005

Overview: This is a maintenance and bugfix release. Some new features include support for EXT2 filesystem formatting, German keyboard layouts, GUID (Globally-Unique Identifier) generation, and filesystem clobber.  Also includes a number of important bugfixes to the Disk Manager program.

  • Implemented EXT2 formatting.
  • Added Jonas Zaddach's German keyboard layout
  • Added GUID-generating capability to the kernel.
  • Filesystem drivers that support 'format' functionality now also support 'clobber' functions, so that for example when a format is done, the filesystem doesn't still get detected as the previous type.
  • The filesystems code now has a proper array of all the different filesystem drivers, that can be iterated through (for example, when doing filesystem detection).
  • Implemented a "multi choice dialog" that shows buttons with user-specified text strings and returns the index of the specified choice.
  • Fixed: In the Disk Manager, when creating partitions, it wasn't possible to create logical partitions. When choosing primary, no primary/logical attribute was shown.
  • Fixed: The EXT filesystem code would fail to mount small filesystems with only a single block group, where the number of blocks was less than the maximum blocks per group.
  • Fixed: In the graphics mode Disk Manager, after specifying start and end values for a new partition, pressing 'Cancel' in the tag type dialog didn't stop the partition from being created.
  • Fixed: The Disk Manager's 'move' function check for empty space on either side of a partition could produce a false error
  • Fixed: The Disk Manager was telling the kernel to reread the partitions too frivolously (especially in between writing the main and extended partition tables).
  • Fixed: The vsh shell's code for marshalling quoted arguments was broken (e.g. 'touch "foo bar"' created 2 files, foo and bar)
  • Fixed: The libc time() function is producing dates off (slow) by 1 year.

VERSION 0.57
24/08/2005

Overview: This is a maintenance and bugfix release.  There are various GUI touch-ups, the Disk Manager now updates disk geometry information in FAT partitions after disk copy operations, the window 'list' component has been reimplemented, and a number of kernel improvements have been back-ported from the 0.6 development branch.

  • When the disk manager does disk-to-disk copies, it now ensures that the disk geometries stored in any FAT partitions are correct.
  • Window lists components now have multi-column mode implemented, are now capable of showing various combinations of icons, text, or both, and they are now able to resize successfully, so that more rows can become visible and multi-column lists get extra columns.
  • Added a window 'selection event' that widgets (such as the window list) can use to differentiate between a pointless click or scrollbar event and a real user selection.
  • Moved command line parsing code into the kernel's loader so that it will parse a raw command line.
  • The window text area component now has an 'update' function that is called by the text area subcomponent to let it know when it has updated (so the window component can update the scroll bar, for example)
  • Added API functions to export the hardware device tree.
  • Exported a portion of the kernelDevice structure as a new 'device' structure.
  • A bunch of the buttons from various windows have had their 'fixed width' parameters set.
  • Added a 'delete recursive' convenience file function.
  • There is now a loaderClassifyFile function that just temporarily reads in the first few sectors of a file in order to classify it.
  • Added loader file class functions for generic text and binary files, and boot sectors.
  • Added an snprintf C library function.
  • The vshFileList (the 'ls' command) function now prints more efficiently.  Previously made millions of print calls.
  • Added a kernelFileCount function to the file functions, so that it's easy to preallocate memory for file entries, etc.
  • The windowGuiThread library function now returns the PID of the GUI thread process so that calling programs can monitor its survival.
  • Updated the help file documentation for the program files.
  • Fixed: If the user doesn't have administrator privileges, the 'disprops' program now grays out the list of screen resolutions because the kernel won't allow it to be changed.  Also, the API functions to get/set the window manager colors have been made into user-privilege functions.
  • Fixed: After "user authentication failed", the login program stopped responding.
  • Fixed: Depending on screen contents, the icon layout in the kernel window shell could allow the text of the bottom-most icon to wrap off the screen.
  • Fixed: The console text area's scroll bar was not being added to windows when the rest of the text area was added; thus the scroll bar did not appear.
  • Fixed: The 'wallpaper' program failed to set the wallpaper if the file name supplied in the file dialog was an absolute path.
  • Fixed: The window list item code had an error in which it undercalculated the length of the text string.

VERSION 0.56
22/07/2005

Overview: This is a maintenance and bugfix release. Important fixes include the elimination of boot hangs due to faulty mouse initialization and full kernel variable lists, a fix to the detection of secondary hard disks, and a fix to faulty mounting of EXT2/3 filesystems.  In addition, important multitasker improvements related to process initialization have been back-ported from the 0.6 development branch.

  • Fixed: The system could fail to boot in graphics mode due to faulty mouse initialization
  • Fixed: The kernel's symbol variable list was becoming full and causing various boot initializations to fail. The kernel's variableList code has been changed so that it automatically manages list memory.
  • Fixed: "ID or target sector not found" messages during boot when a second (slave, for example) hard disk was present.
  • Fixed: EXT2 mounting had become generally broken
  • Back-ported the 0.6 branch multitasker changes (to do with processImage structures and argument passing).
  • The exception handler process now displays a dialog box when a program crashes, so that they don't simply disappear (requiring the user to look at the console output for the reason)
  • Added a system to generate the programs' help file text from comments within the source code, so that it's easier to keep up to date.
  • Fixed: When a mount attempt failed, it was possible to end up with a rogue '/' entry added to the root directory, which could render the whole directory tree useless until reboot.
  • "Genericized" the image loading functions so that they first identify the format, then call the appropriate routines to interpret it.
  • Fixed: When calling kernelWindowDestroy() with a window that had user containers, there were a number of "Container data is NULL" error messages.
  • The kernelError code no longer prints the current process name if the error occurs inside an interrupt handler; it prints the interrupt handler number instead.
  • Any window components that contain other components now remove them from the parent container, if applicable. (windowTextArea and windowTitleBar, for example).
  • Fixed: After choosing the destination disk in the install program, there was an error message from kernelMemoryManager.c:838:The memory pointer is not mapped.
  • The ELF loader code now marks executable code pages as read-only, ELF headers are now processed more correctly (side effect: eliminating various messages about unexpected number of ELF headers)
  • Changed the FAT, EXT, and ISO filesystem drivers to take more advantage of packed structures for better efficiency.
  • Fixed: The 'format' program was inadvertently ignoring the '-t' filesystem type option.
  • Fixed: If the default background color was not used, the text area widget's scroll bar would use that background color rather than the normal grey.
  • Un-exported the filesystem functions in the FAT, ISO, and EXT drivers.
  • The 'imgboot' program now shows the OS version in the title.

VERSION 0.55
18/05/2005

Overview: This is a maintenance and bugfix release, with some additional capabilities including installation support for all FAT filesystems, primitive PCI driver support, and a better organised device driver infrastructure. In addition, GUI window layout and resizing has been reimplemented and generally fixed.

  • The system can now install to and boot from any kind of FAT filesystem (FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32/VFAT).
  • Fixed window relayout when windows are sized.
  • Implemented a better-organised hardware device "tree" and a new, more generic device driver interface.
  • Added a basic PCI bus driver, the initial implementation of which was provided by Jonas Zaddach. Only logs a bus device scan, for the moment.
  • Implemented a basic a signalling infrastructure, which initially fixes the problem of CTRL-C crashing the system in text mode.
  • Back-ported a number of changes and improvements from the 0.6 branch to the kernel's disk layer.
  • Added a 'debug window layout' function that displays the layout grid alongside the components; makes it much easier to do program window design and to debug the kernel's layout code.
  • The window manager's event handler thread now dynamically allocates the memory it uses for storing event hooks.
  • Implemented the 'swab' libc function. Useful for networking.
  • The page manager's 'get physical address' function has been modified so that it works with addresses that aren't page-aligned.
  • The interrupt controller functions now have a function that returns the active interrupt number, and synchronized the kernel's hardware interrupt number codes with the 'normal' PC interrupt numbers (e.g. 0-F).
  • Fixed: Interrupts are now disabled during the pause before reboot, so that for example the kernel is not still processing I/O interrupts and such.
  • Fixed: A number of small issues with the kernelWindowStream code.
  • Fixed: In the install program, installing on a freshly-inserted floppy. could produce the error message "can't install a boot sector for filesystem type 'unknown'".
  • Fixed: When installing from a 'basic' install, there was a spurious error message resulting from attempting to look for the 'full' install file.

VERSION 0.54
22/03/2005

Overview: This is a maintenance release, with numerous small improvements and bug fixes including some general back-porting from the 0.6 development branch.  In addition, IDE disk-to-disk operations have been improved so that they can happen in parallel, the kernel hardware drivers' interrupt handing has been given a new interface, and there is some improved efficiency in a performance-critical section of the multitasker.

  • Updated the IDE disk controller locking, so that each now have their own locks; thus I/O can be done in parallel between disks on different controllers.
  • Back-ported large numbers small changes and improvements from the 0.6 development branch.
  • Cleaned up the kernelInterrupt code, got rid of all the 'default' handlers, added an interface for getting/hooking the vectors, and changed all the built-in drivers to use the interface. All interrupts are now initially masked off, and the hardware driver code for each kind of device has to turn them on after hooking the handler.
  • The bootable floppy image for the ISO distribution now contains only the OS loader and the kernel, because only these are used. This shrinks the (zipped) ISO image size.
  • The calculation of CPU percentage in the multitasker's scheduler is now done more efficiently, inside the loop that evaluates the process queue.
  • Added text 'save screen' and 'restore screen' functions for use by programs such as 'fdisk' and 'install' which clear the screen.
  • Added convenience functions to the kernelUser code for working with arbitrary password files, so that for example the installer can set up the destination password file without doing it all manually.
  • Added kernelDiskGet() (single logical or physical), kernelDiskGetAll(), and kernelDiskGetAllPhysical() functions.
  • The kernel's page manager now includes a method for setting flags on pages (such as writable, present, cache disable, etc), and a function that allows memory to be mapped at a particular address.
  • Created a user-space 'process image' structure that can describe details such as memory page mapping, virtual addresses, entry points, arguments, and so on.
  • kernelError.h now contains the include for <sys/errors.h>
  • Fixed: Copying a big file such as an .iso image could fail because the copy code tried to allocate enough memory for the whole file. Now it allocates as much as possible and does multiple reads/writes
  • Fixed: Typing and using the mouse at the same time was causing funny things to go on. The interrupt handlers for the two devices needed to be better synchronized.
  • Fixed: When dragging an icon, one pixel-width of the icon title wasn't being erased properly.
  • Fixed: The FAT12 boot sector source code shipped with version 0.53 didn't work for floppy disks
  • Fixed: In the libc's _xpndfmt.c function (used by printf, sprintf, etc), the numDigits() function was returning the wrong value for large signed numbers, resulting in double-width numbers for format strings such as %08x.
  • Fixed: The graphics mode text driver was not recognizing 'longest lines' if the cursor had been moved around using the textSetRow function.
  • Fixed: Doing a second kernel make without changing anything resulted in an empty kernelSymbols.txt file, since the previous make stripped the kernel.

VERSION 0.53
01/02/2005

Overview: This is a maintenance release, with numerous small improvements and bug fixes.  A number of unnecessary files and programs have been removed.

  • Re-engineered the kernel's file handling code so that it uses less stack memory, has less code redundancy, and exports different functions to the rest of the kernel than it does to user space.
  • The format operation causes the kernel to re-scan the partitions, so that the new filesystem type is recorded in the disk structure
  • The Program Manager now shows overall memory usage totals.
  • The 'mem' command now prints totals in kilobytes, and uses a structure from the kernel (a new API function) describing the memory blocks, rather than the kernel printing out the information directly. Subsequently, deprecated the kernelMemoryPrintUsage() function.
  • The shutdown program now attempts to eject the CD-ROM a second time if required, since it seems that some drives will fail on the first attempt but succeed on the second.
  • The FAT boot sectors no longer rely on the disk geometry they get from the DOS BPB block. They get it from the BIOS instead.
  • Removed the 'move' command (there's already a 'mv' command)
  • Removed a large number of unimplemented libc function files.
  • Moved the libc global data into crt0.c
  • The boot sectors/OS loader that capture key presses ("press any key...") now use the BIOS' int 16h function instead of trapping the hardware interrupt.
  • Deprecated the kernelDisk{Read|Write}Absolute functions. Instead, the normal kernelDisk{Read|Write} functions are now able to figure out whether the supplied disk name is physical or logical.
  • The libvsh functions no longer call perror(). They still set errno, and then leave perror() up to the caller.
  • Added the -W and -Wshadow options to Makefiles.
  • Added -ffreestanding to Makefiles, to ensure that the compiler isn't including built-in functions we're not expecting.
  • Got rid of the "unsigned int" terminology everywhere and replaced it with simple "unsigned"
  • Fixed: The Disk Manager was showing 1MB total size for all disks
  • Fixed: In the Disk Manager's 'create partition' function, if you supplied bad start/end values, the logical/primary choice would be disabled when the dialog box came back.
  • Fixed: When copying a file, if the destination was a directory (rather than a fully-specified file name), there was a kernelFileDelete error message
  • Fixed: when the vshCursorMenu scrolled the screen, it looked funny.
  • Fixed: 'ls' an unknown file, hang!

VERSION 0.52
14/01/2005

Overview: This is a maintenance and bugfix release, with some additional features, such as improved disk-to-disk copies and partition table reordering in the Disk Manager, and additional C library functions.

  • Implemented threaded, double-buffered disk IO for the 'copy disk' functionality of the disk manager.
  • The disk manager's slice list now indicates the disk name and file system type (if available), and it is now possible to change the partition table ordering - i.e., changing drive names/letters.
  • The vsh history is bigger, and there is now a 'history' command.
  • Added open(), lseek(), read(), write(), close(), fprintf, fread(), fwrite(), and stat() C library functions.
  • The kernelError messages now indicate the name of the process that caused the error.
  • The 'disks' command now reports the filesystem type, if known, and not just the partition label.
  • Exported the kernelMultitaskerProcessIsAlive() function.
  • The 'vsh' and 'ls' commands have been updated to improve their stack/data memory usages.
  • The kernelConfigurationWriter has been reworked so that if the file already exists, it writes the new one to a temp location first, then moves the new one over top.
  • Fixed up the Makefiles a bit and we now make sure that we're building with the correct CPU specified.
  • Fixed up 'errno' implementation in the C library.
  • Fixed: The disk manager 'copy disk' failure was leaving the dialog box on the screen.
  • Fixed: The format command could hang when doing a large FAT32 filesystem.
  • Fixed: The 'rmdir' functionality was broken, because the '.' and '..' entries were not being removed correctly.
  • Fixed: In the disk manager's 'create partition' function, specifying a megabyte size value overflowed at 4096m.
  • Fixed: The windowList component has been changed to stop implementing its own idea of 'container', and use the standard container component.
  • Fixed: Deleting the old menu list items in kernelWindowShellUpdateList() was causing crashes; it was disabled in the 0.5 release, and it was a pretty serious memory leak.
  • Fixed: The 'umount' command failed when a following / was after the mount point name.

VERSION 0.51
30/12/2004

Overview: This is a maintenance and bugfix release, with some additional features, such as the Disk Manager's ability to fix small partition table consistency errors.

  • Enhanced the bootstrap code so that it is possible to boot on some trickier hardware platforms, such as Toshiba laptops.
  • The disk manager now offers to fix errors turned up by the partition table check.
  • The disk thread now respawns when it is killed [ thanks Thomas Kreitner ].
  • The 'install' program now show a progress meter in text mode while copying files.
  • When the shutdown program is attempting to eject the disk, it now shows a banner dialog since sometimes it takes a couple of seconds.
  • In the text area code, when the screen is cleared, the existing screen contents are no longer rolled back into the buffer -- they are discarded.
  • Deprecated the windowPack() and windowSetPacked() API functions.
  • While attempting builds with gcc version 3.4.2, fixed a number of bugs and details that the newer compiler found.
  • Fixed: The program manager wasn't really putting threads under their correct process parents; it merely put them in order as received from the kernel.
  • Fixed: The getopt() library function was being used incorrectly by a number of the user applications.
  • Fixed: It was possible to kill the exception handler thread, which caused an immediate triple fault [ thanks Thomas Kreitner ].
  • Fixed: Broken CD-ROM floppy disk emulations no longer trick the loader into detecting nonexistent floppies.
  • Fixed: On some hardware, the kernel's hardware detection could be tricked into detecting nonexistent fixed disks with NULL geometry.
  • Fixed: The 'megabytes' value being printed for hard disks by the loader was severely wrong.

VERSION 0.5
12/12/2004

Overview: This release adds logical partition capabilities to both the kernel and the Disk Manager (which has been substantially rewritten), window minimizing, a GUI taskbar for managing windows, new icons and cleaner desktop layout, a 'Program Manager' application, and a temporary file interface -- as well as lots of bug fixes and smaller tweaks.

  • Added support for hard disk logical partitions
  • Added a 'taskbar' menu to the top of the root window.
  • Added 'minimize' functionality to windows.
  • Made a 'program manager' program that allows a user to manage running processes, etc.
  • Enlarged the disk manager window and its canvas, and added a more action buttons.
  • Added a 'show info' action to the disk manager.
  • Implemented the ability to 'hide' partitions in the disk manager
  • The disk manager now includes an option for writing a fresh partition table to a disk.
  • The disk manager now allows the disk to be specified as a command line argument.
  • The disk manager now has a better GUI interface for creating a new partition.
  • Implemented a temporary file interface
  • The install program now shows which install disk is selected when in graphics mode.
  • Made a new 'shell' icon for the command window, added icons for the program manager and configuration editor, and removed the 'logout' and 'shutdown' icons from the desktop.
  • Programs that can run in both graphics and text modes (such as the disk manager and the installer) now have a standard -T argument that causes them to run in text mode.
  • Added a libvsh 'cursor menu'. Converted imgboot, fdisk, etc. to use it.
  • Added the ability to have comment lines in the install files
  • Created a libvsh function for parsing a command line into command and args, suitable for passing to the loaderLoadAndExec function.
  • Added a user-space 'process' struct, and converted the 'ps' command to use it.
  • The date/time printing library functions have been cleaned up and fixed so that they don't print superfluous spaces
  • Restored the 'ownership' attributes of input streams, and restored the CTRL-C functionality.
  • Moved the 'dist' directory out of the 'utils' area and into the top level directory
  • Added strchr and strrchr C library functions
  • Added a kernelStreamDestroy() function to complement kernelStreamNew()
  • Attempting to mount a CD will now close the tray before the attempt, if it's open.
  • Removed the icons= line from windowmanager.conf. The window shell will now figure out the list of icons dynamically based on which ones are actually specified in the file
  • The 'format' now has 2 additional modes: a graphical mode, and a non- interactive 'silent' mode.
  • (Re)-implemented the ability to get a screen shot from a key press.  The 'instant screenshot' is triggered by [PRINT SCRN] key, and multiple shots can be taken this way without overwriting one another.
  • The vsh prompt is no longer the whole directory path; just the current directory name.
  • The window checkbox widget now ignores the user-specified foreground color for the 'x', since we always use white for the background behind it, and if the foreground was white, no 'x' would be visible.
  • The graphical shutdown program now offers an 'eject CD-ROM' checkbox when booted from CD-ROM, since otherwise the door stays locked and getting the CD out during the BIOS POST can be tricky.
  • CTRL-ALT-DEL now does a proper shutdown, so that the disks are synced before rebooting.
  • Removed the exception handler's 'core dump' code, since it wasn't all that useful without tracing/debugging facilities.
  • Clicking outside of all of a window's components now removes the focus from any focused component.
  • Fixed: The 'cdrom' program's help page claimed that it will attempt to guess the name of the device is not specified, but that hadn't been implemented. It always picked the first cdrom.
  • Fixed: The ATAPI driver was not reliably ejecting CD-ROMs.
  • Fixed: The window manager screenshot code was crashy
  • Fixed: The 'display settings' program's 'show clock on the desktop' thing was very crashy.
  • Fixed: The kernelFileStreamClose() function now destroys the stream.  Previously it didn't do so and was a memory leak.
  • Fixed: The installation program now calculates the required space more accurately, and verifies adequate disk space *before* starting the installation.
  • Fixed: Extra (second) floppy disks were showing up where they didn't exist
  • Fixed: The disk manager's formatting functionality was crashy
  • Fixed: In graphics mode, the disk manager's action buttons were not being laid out properly.
  • Fixed: In graphics mode, the disk name argument of the disk manager didn't properly select the disk in the disk list.
  • Fixed: The kernel logger was inserting random characters into the log at 512-byte boundaries.
  • Fixed: The return value of the library memcmp function. If comparison failed on the first byte, it was returning success (0).
  • Fixed: Partition Magic was complaining about the disk manager's CHS values being incorrect.  In particular it wasn't liking our 'maxed out' head and sector values when a partition started or ended at a cylinder > 1024.
  • Fixed: When creating new partitions in the disk manager, Partition Magic was showing multiple ones as active.
  • Fixed: Dragging an icon was executing the program, as if the icon were simply clicked
  • Fixed: Seeking/writing to the end of a file stream was broken.
  • Fixed: Typing during a graphics mode screen scroll left stray cursors on the screen and could cause crashes
  • Fixed: When snapping the icons in the root window, the window layout was being redone too many times (once for *every* icon that moved).
  • Fixed: The menu bar component was ignoring any user-specified font.
  • Fixed: Window title bar menus are no longer drawn if there are no items in them.
  • Fixed: The window canvas component was generating a kernelMemoryRelease message about a pointer not being mapped.
  • Fixed: Causing the console text area to scroll while it wasn't visible caused a triple-fault.
  • Fixed: The status messages in the graphical install program were wrapping off the window.
  • Fixed: If a CD-ROM was a master with a slave, that CD-ROM was not detected.  If the slave was also a CD-ROM, neither was detected.
  • Fixed: The system was unable to boot from the second CD-ROM device.
  • Fixed: Running the 'install' program with a disk name argument was not working

VERSION 0.42
11/09/2004

Overview: This is primarily a bugfix release, with some added features including the ability to format partitions from the Disk Manager, plus vertical scroll bars on text areas and visual reimplementation of "grayed out" window components.

  • Enabled filesystem formatting functionality in the disk manager.
  • Implemented vertical scroll bars and extended buffers on window text area components
  • Improved the 'graying out' functionality in the window manager; it didn't look great with the default colors and looked positively silly with some other color schemes.
  • Reimplemented the 'hidden' functionality of window text areas so that the buffer contains the real content, and the visible area contains the asterisks. The 'get data' function returns the data from the buffer.
  • The window manager now makes more use of the busy mouse pointer
  • Restored window list locking, now that interrupt handlers don't need access.
  • Created a new logo for the splash image
  • In the disk manager, there is now a confirmation dialog before moving partitions
  • Added a 'get disk by file' function.
  • The 'disk' structures now contain a set of flags to indicate which filesystem functions are available from the appropriate driver, if applicable.
  • Moved the window event processing out of the execution path of interrupt handlers and into the window manager thread
  • Added 'new' and 'destroy' functions for kernelTextAreas
  • Moved icons and fonts into subdirectories under /system
  • Added a way to specify whether a loadable font should be fixed-width
  • Removed instances of 'bzero' calls in the kernel. We have a much better kernelMemClear() function.
  • Added a 'strncasecmp' C library function
  • Simplified the management of 'kernelFilesystem' structures in the filesystem code.
  • The graphics code (main, framebuffer driver, and window manager and friends) now uses ints instead of unsigneds for widths and heights
  • Moved the font argument from some window components into the componentParameters structure
  • Fixed: Setting the widest item in a GUI menu to not enabled caused a bit of the menu border to get grayed out as well.
  • Fixed: State changes in the disk manager's disk and partition lists caused by key events were not being handled properly.
  • Fixed: In the User Manager, when adding a new user, if the user already existed the program would still prompt for a password.
  • Fixed: In 16-bit video mode, window titles were not displaying proper transparency
  • Fixed: The size/drawing of the items in list components was slightly off.
  • Fixed: If fonts or icons are missing, there's a panic
  • Fixed: The text mode console driver was not scrolling properly when printing long lines. The next line would overwrite the wrapped part of the previous one.

VERSION 0.41
09/08/2004

Overview: This is primarily a bugfix release, with some added features, including the ability to move partitions, a configuration editor, and a keymap editor.  There are also a number of small tweaks to graphical components and GUI user settings.

  • The disk manager can now move partitions in contiguous space (i.e. it can 'slide' them from side to side)
  • Created a 'configuration editor' for editing configuration files
  • Created a 'keymap editor' for choosing keyboard layout.
  • In the Disk Manager, clicking on a colored slice in the canvas area now selects the partition
  • Added a 'color chooser' window library dialog box
  • The window shell thread now loads programs automatically based on things specified in the window manager config file.
  • Added a pretty xterm font (modified from the xterm program under Linux).
  • Made it possible to set the default foreground, background, and desktop colors for all graphics operations in the kernel.conf file.
  • Added a 'show clock on desktop' checkbox to the display properties app with an accompanying clock app.
  • Implemented right and middle mouse click events.
  • The radio button GUI widget will now accept focus and allow keyboard control
  • In the Disk Manager, when a new partition is created, it is now selected afterward.
  • When copying disks in the disk manager, added a better prompt dialog to ask which disk to copy to, with a clickable list instead of a typing prompt, and it doesn't prompt about which disk to copy to if there's only one other choice
  • Made the 'scroll bar' GUI widget available from user space
  • Calling 'set selected' with GUI list widgets now scrolls the list if necessary so that the selected one is visible.
  • The window manager no longer re-saves its config file at shutdown
  • Added a 'cancel' button to the 'copy disk' dialog of the disk manager
  • Mouse dragging events now filter down to the user space via the event stream.
  • Added a 'kill by name' function to the multitasker.
  • Added a 'focus' routine to the menu widget, so that when the menu will disappear itself if it loses the focus
  • Made a more friendly error message for the help command when there is not a help file for the topic.
  • Fixed: In 15-bit graphics modes, the colors were all wrong.
  • Fixed: The window list component was not responding very accurately to movements of the vertical slider, the slider was picking up both up-and-down mouse clicks, and dragging wasn't all that perfect either.
  • Fixed: It was possible to resize a window down to nothing (or less than nothing!!).
  • Fixed: The mouse pointer was leaving tracers when dragging or resizing windows, or dragging icons
  • Fixed: Compilation failed on SuSE 9, with gcc 3.3.3 and (more importantly) whatever GNU ld comes with it.
  • Fixed: It wasn't possible to hide a GUI component if they had the focus.
  • Fixed: The format command stopped accepting a lone disk name argument
  • Fixed: The framebuffer graphic driver was not drawing any part of outlined rectangles if part of the rectangle was off the screen.
  • Fixed: Resizing list components was not resizing the subcomponent list items
  • Fixed: Multiple buttons inside a container component were not picking up window events.
  • Fixed: The arial bold 10 font's equals ('=') sign was a plus ('+')
  • Fixed: Pressing CTRL-ALT-DELETE in graphics mode produced a panic with 'can't yield() in interrupt handler'

VERSION 0.4
19/07/2004

Overview: This release features a number of graphical interface improvements, including several new GUI widgets and "newbie" usability tweaks. The 'install' and 'disk manager' programs have been properly GUI-enabled, and this release also adds user authentication with MD5 password encryption.

  • Implemented the following GUI widgets: checkbox, radio button, menu bar (plus menu, and menu item), progress bar, canvas, scroll bar, list (plus list item), and password field
  • Implemented 'container' components which can be nested arbitrarily, and have their layout done individually. Added a top level 'container' component to the window structure and removed the simple list of components.
  • When running from a CD-ROM or other read-only filesystem, there is now a general warning that the user can't modify settings or change anything generally.
  • The OS loader now gives the kernel a list of supported graphics resolutions/depths that are supported, and there is user preference for choosing the mode, which the OS loader now reads from a file.
  • Improved the hardware structure in the OS loader so that it makes use of NASM's STRUCT directive
  • Added text-mode password prompting code to the vsh library
  • Exported locking and variable list functionality to user space.
  • The 'configuration reader/writer' code is more sophisticated, so that it preserves comment lines (if replacing an existing config file)
  • Updated the install image generation scripts, and fixed the naming of the generated images
  • Created a new background image that isn't so 'busy'. Removed the old ones.
  • The 'start program' loaded by the kernel is now specified dynamically in a file, and added an 'image boot' program to be loaded first when booting from an ISO or floppy image distribution that will prompt the user whether they want to install, or simply run from that image.
  • In the vsh, you no longer need to put a space between the last command argument and any ampersand
  • Implemented Bresenham's lines and circles algorithms in the framebuffer graphic driver.
  • Both the native installer and the UNIX installation scripts now use file lists and include options to do a 'basic' versus 'full' install.
  • The FAT filesystem driver no longer calculates the filesystem free space asynchronously. Previously, this meant that an application could not know
  • how long to wait before it could begin writing to a freshly-mounted filesystem.
  • Graphicized both the 'install' and 'disk manager' programs
  • After copying a larger disk to a smaller one in the disk manager, we now go through the entries in the partition table and adjust them so that none have illegal values. That means, for example, deleting or truncating partitions that don't fit on the smaller disk.
  • Added a 'cursoring' effect to the text mode disk manager, since it makes the flow better (not required to type partition numbers, etc.), and which means that a partition or empty space is always selected, which fits better with the graphics mode use model.
  • The disk manager program now saves disk-specific backup MBRs in the /system/boot directory
  • The window manager thread now checks that windows' processes are still alive, so that it doesn't require a mouse click to dispose of the window. Also, if the window manager thread dies it is now restarted
  • 'Visopsys blue' is now the default foreground color for most GUI components (rather than black).
  • Removed the start window and replaced it with a simple splash image
  • Changed remaining 'csh' scripts to 'sh' and removed the unused stuff from the /utils/src-mgmt directory
  • Rearranges the source code directory structure and build system a little bit, so that there is a top-level 'build' directory which contains all the installable stuff in the correct places. This allowed the installer to be a lot simpler and facilitated the implementation of installation file lists.
  • Implemented a 'getopt' library function and converted the contents of the 'programs' directory to use it.
  • Added a 'window shell' thread which is the new user login process in graphics mode, and which handles events on components in the root window.
  • Added 'delete user' functionality to both the kernelUser code and the 'user manager' program.
  • Added a 'passwd' command that shows as a 'user manager' in the GUI, that can be used to change passwords and create/delete accounts.
  • Separated the source files for the different libraries into subdirectories, and broke out the libvsh and libwindow code into separate source files to reduce executable sizes.
  • Added a 'file selection' dialog box into the window lib.
  • Font printing by default draws the background color under the character.  Transparent images are still an option.
  • Added a 'flags' field to the kernelWindow structure, since there were a few booleans and it's a waste of space to make them all ints.
  • Vsh file completion now works like bash when there's only one 'real' item in a directory - complete it with just a [tab]
  • Made it possible to click between multiple text areas in window
  • Added user authentication to the login program
  • Improved handling of width specifiers for 'printf' number parameters.
  • Added an MD5 encryption implementation
  • A commands is no longer added to the vsh history if it's the same as the previous one
  • The keyboard code now reads the lights status at startup so that it doesn't reset them improperly. Also, numlock works.
  • Implemented enable/disable functionality for GUI components.
  • Implemented a 'set visible' function for components
  • Implemented 'set disabled' functionality for window menu items
  • Added 'resizable X' and 'resizable Y' fields in the component parameter structure, and only resize components appropriately
  • Simplified the process of adding components to windows, so that you only have to call the 'new' function, with the component parameters, and it will be added to the window automatically.
  • Removed the 'size' parameters from the 'button' component constructor
  • Implemented the 'get data' and 'set data' methods of text label components, so that the label contents can be dynamic.
  • Added a window component flag that will prevent a [tab] from unfocusing certain components.
  • Removed the coordinate and size parameters from the "new window" function of the window manager. The window size is determined automatically unless the "set size" function is called.
  • Window layout happens automatically. The programmer no longer has to do this explicitly.
  • Added resizing capability to the windows in the window manager.
  • Window buttons are now focusable and can handle various keyboard events
  • Implemented proper 'focusing' of window components
  • Added a function for getting the contents of a text field or text area component in the window manager
  • The window close button no longer uses the little 'X' image file, but rather draws its own 'X' using the new bresenham line drawing abilities.
  • Changed the 'shutdown' program so that in graphics mode it prompts for a reboot or shutdown
  • Added a better 'install' icon.
  • Added a GPL banner to the image boot program
  • Disabled the left-right cursor keys in the vsh, as they tend to make people think they can do line editing (which they can't, yet).
  • Fixed: If the screen dimensions are too small to accommodate a window, it doesn't appear at all.
  • Fixed: Pressing CTRL-ALT-DELETE in graphics mode produces a panic with 'can't yield() in interrupt handler'
  • Fixed: The 'screenshot' program was crashing when attempting to write to read-only filesystems.
  • Fixed: If the floppy was removed while the boot loader was loading the kernel, it was going into long retry loops
  • Fixed: File input streams were horribly broken in the ISO9660 filesystem driver. Before the fix they would only read the first sector.
  • Fixed: argv[0] was not being set by the loader code. It was only being set explicitly by the vsh when programs are executed, which it shouldn't do at all.
  • Fixed: The arrangement of icons in the root window so that they wrap into the next column when they hit the bottom of the screen
  • Fixed: There was trouble (triple-fault) drawing outline (non-filled) rectangles in the framebuffer graphic driver, if they were partially off the edges of the screen
  • Fixed: The ELF loader was not allocating enough memory for the uninitialized data that executables might require.
  • Fixed: The free spaces calculation in the disk manager was incorrect, particularly when there was only one partition that didn't start at zero
  • Fixed: "component cannot focus" error messages when clicking on icon components
  • Fixed: When booting from the hard disk , the opening of the kernel log file often failed with a "not enough space" message.
  • Fixed: In text mode, the login process was not properly setting supervisor privilege for the 'admin' user
  • Fixed: When windows were dragged, the focus was lost from the focused component.
  • Fixed: Text fields were coming up with their cursors on by default.
  • Fixed: The kernel.log file was not being updated/written correctly.
  • Fixed: The fileWrite routine was not behaving as expected when writing a single-block file. The file size was zero, even though the file was written and closed properly
  • Fixed: When writing a file using the file stream functions, there was a newline inserted at the beginning of a file.

VERSION 0.33
11/01/2004

Overview: This is primarily a bugfix release, with bootable CD-ROM support added as a new feature.

  • Added bootable ISO9660 (el-torito) CD-ROM support.
  • The 'no boot' boot sector code no longer reboots the system, but instead properly calls the next boot option
  • Fixed: Spurious error messages when booting from a read-only file system.
  • Fixed the kernel heap allocation code, which was losing and corrupting blocks of memory, and leaving small, odd-sized gaps of unused memory.
  • Polished up the scripts for creating floppy & CD-ROM images
  • Fixed: No longer attempt to recalibrate ATAPI disks.
  • If a CD-ROM read fails because there is no disk, the driver no longer leaves the number of sectors at zero, since that will stop all subsequent read attempts
  • The CD-ROM driver code can determine more elegantly whether there is a data CD in the drive and if not, print a friendly error message.

VERSION 0.32
04/01/2004

Overview: This is primarily a bugfix release, with CD-ROM and ISO9660 filesystem support added as new (alpha) features.

  • Added (multi-session capable) CD-ROM driver code
  • Fixed: The 'date' command day of the week was wrong.
  • Created a set of help text files for all of the commands, in a /programs/helpfiles subdirectory. The 'help' command is now an executable which can provide command-specific help.
  • The 'vsh' shell now has a '-c' option so that it can be used to execute commands, non-interactively.
  • Added a 'system' Visopsys C library function
  • Added a 'driver data' field in the physical disk object, so that the different drivers can store device-specific data there. Implemented the floppy driver's 'detect' and 'register device' routines to remove some of the floppy-specific stuff from the hardware detection code.
  • The 'mount' and 'umount' commands will now accept relative pathnames
  • Added an ISO9660 filesystem driver
  • Eliminated spurious floppy timeout error messages when booting from hard disks.
  • Fixed: Unknown floppy drive types were causing hardware detection (and therefore the whole startup) to fail.

VERSION 0.31
12/12/2003

Overview: This is primarily a bugfix release, with EXT2 filesystem support added as a new (alpha) feature.

  • Implemented a preliminary, alpha, read-only EXT2 filesystem driver
  • The libraries and (non-kernel) include files have been relicensed under the GNU LGPL to permit use by proprietary programs
  • The IDE/ATA/ATAPI driver was not responding to disks on the secondary controller.
  • Fixed: The 'cat' program wasn't printing tabs properly the way the 'more' program does.
  • Fixed: kernelMalloc allocations were not necessarily being done on any boundaries. It is now done on sizeof(unsigned) (dword) boundaries.
  • Added a *very* basic 'find' program which only traverses whole directory trees. Initially to aid in development of new filesystems

VERSION 0.3
24/11/2003

Overview: This release is very much an "under the hood" release. The user interaction is similar to that of 0.2, but a great deal of work has gone into improving the structure, performance, and stability of the underlying code -- particularly the disk subsystem. However, some eye candy has been added, and the GUI is more functional and consistent.

  • A thread of a process can now kill the parent process.
  • Created a multitasker 'detach' function for daemons or other programs to use to detach themselves from any programs that might be blocking on them.
  • Fixed: Windows wasn't entirely happy with our FAT short filename aliases.  Complained about the format of the short name of "/system/boot/bootsect.fatnoboot"
  • Changed the naming of the kernel window components (removed the 'component' bit from the names)
  • Fixed: File completions were completing things they shouldn't; i.e. when you "cd system; ls b[tab]" it completed "background" but there's a "boot" directory as well.
  • The window manager thread is now the login process for a user when in graphics mode, rather than a text shell running in a console window.
  • Reduced the stack sizes of processes. They shouldn't need nearly as much (260K) as they were being given.
  • Removed all the 'binary distribution' stuff (the Java installer, shell scripts, readmes, etc). We will only do binary distributions as floppy or ISO images from now on.
  • The console window is no longer shown by default. Added a program and icon ('console') to display it and handle the window events, etc. Added external API functions to put a console widget into a user program.
  • Changed the error reporting interface for the disk drivers. Removed the 'last error message' and 'last error code' functions -- these were leftovers from the days of ASM drivers that couldn't use the normal error reporting mechanisms.
  • Fixed: The mouse was not being redrawn when windows close themselves.
  • Implemented 'levels' for GUI components within a window, in the same manner as windows have levels. This way if components overlap, we can only send windowEvents to the uppermost one.
  • Sped up the scrolling of graphics text areas. Now only scroll as much of the width of the area as the longest line of contents.
  • Fixed up the framebuffer graphic driver a little bit more so that it draws most efficiently for the bit depth it's using.
  • Implemented kernel versions of malloc() and free() so that we're not always wasting whole pages of memory for small things.
  • Added shutdown and reboot buttons to the login screen in graphics mode.
  • Implemented text labels on kernelWindowButton components, with selectable font.
  • Fixed: Window layout problems. Attempting to add reboot and shutdown buttons to the login screen, I discovered that setting the component's gridWidth parameters to 2 causes a crash. In addition, when I incorrectly left the gridWidth at 1 and attempted to add the 2 buttons below (using 2 grid places) they were erroneously placed on the line above, and the other widgets got squashed together.
  • Added an event notification callback mechanism for user programs that use the GUI. When a user performs a GUI action, such as clicking a button, the user application can now read that event from the component.
  • As a supplement to this, implemented user-mode library code for monitoring window component event queues. It includes a "GUI run" function that signals the application is ready to begin monitoring its widgets for events, after all its setup is done. The rest of the flow can be driven by callbacks from events. All of the included programs have been converted to use these features.
  • Added a logout procedure for the window manager (rather than having to log out by hand from the console window)
  • Implemented a better "kernel panic" routine that displays something useful in either text or graphics mode and shuts things down quickly.
  • Interrupt handlers and their actions are no longer allowed to yield(), wait(), block(), etc.
  • Fixed: Moving the mouse in text mode is disrupting keyboard input
  • The fdisk program will save a backup copy of the MBR before writing changes, and provides an option to restore it.
  • The graphic/text console drivers, as well as the FAT filesystem driver, have abstracted driver registration procedures like the hardware drivers do.
  • The API calls in kernelApi.c are now 'hashed' according to their function number, for faster API throughput.
  • Added a routine to the generic disk code for reading the disks' partition tables (instead of in the hardware enumeration code). It is be re-callable anytime so that programs like fdisk can create/delete partitions and have the change be reflected immediately in the list of logical disks.
  • Cleaned up the management of the kernel's built-in drivers. The drivers now have an 'init' that registers the driver structure with the kernel, so that the kernelDriverManagement code doesn't have to have all the functions hard-coded in there.
  • Disk caches are invalidated when removable media is unmounted.
  • The boot sector and the OS loader can now boot from a cylinder > 1024.
  • Large disk geometries are now correctly evaluated by the hardware detection code and by the fdisk program.
  • Created a 'non-bootable' FAT boot sector, that the formatting code uses to make non-system FAT volumes
  • When files are copied, the sizes are now being set correctly.
  • The new floppy driver C code no longer freezes up the computer if you remove the media unexpectedly.
  • Hardware enumeration and fdisk no longer fail when there is no partition table on the hard disk
  • FAT filesystem root directories now have '.' entries (and '..' entries when they're not '/')
  • Removing the last file in a directory (for example, in the root of a filesystem) no longer produces an error message.
  • Fixed up the filesystem driver stuff, so that there is only one instance of each driver of each known type
  • In the FAT filesystem driver, file names that start with '.' were listed, but could not be created or accessed. This is fixed.
  • Implemented FAT filesystem driver formatting functionality
  • Improved the fdisk program so that it can do most common operations
  • When there are no files in a directory, 'ls' no longer prints an error message.
  • When doing disk reads, we now do read-ahead caching
  • The kernel is now able to handle operation from a read-only or write-protected media without spewing errors and getting panicky.
  • kernelLocks are now exclusive even to the same process. i.e. If a process owns a lock, calling kernelLockGet() a second time fails.
  • Added a UK English keyboard mapping
  • The disk code should launches a new 'synchronizer' thread if the existing one dies.
  • The exception handler tries to do a stack dump when an exception occurs.
  • The filesystem code is now correctly updating FAT short filename aliases when files are moved.
  • Updated the loader code that searches for a valid video mode. It now searches for *any* LFB video mode first, and reports an error to that effect if it finds none. That is a different scenario than not finding a 'desired' video mode.
  • Added LFB graphic driver support for bit depths of 32, 16, and 15 BPP.
  • Remove the FAT sector caching from the FAT filesystem driver.
  • Changed the filesystem synchronizer so that it is now a *disk* daemon that simply turns removable drives' motors off.
  • Implemented proper asynchronous disk caching.
  • Kernel symbols to aid debugging, in the /system/kernelSymbols.txt file, which is read at startup and used for stack traces and whatnot.
  • Converted all built-in drivers from ASM to C, with inline ASM in a processor-specific header file. This makes it easier for them to use the C data structures, etc., for better integration with the rest of the kernel.
  • THERE IS NO LONGER ANY NASM ASSEMBLY CODE IN THE KERNEL. Woo!
  • Changed 'root' user to 'admin' user -- something less geeky/UNIXy.
  • The kernelDisk structure is broken up into physical objects and logical disks (volumes, i.e. hard disk partitions, but every physical disk has at least one logical disk). The disk cache, 'idle since' value, physical characteristics, etc., are in the physical disk. Things like starting sector, number of sectors, etc., are in the logical disk structure. The physical disk structure contains the logical ones.
  • Added some memory manager macros so that each memory block request doesn't require an alignment specification (only where desired)
  • Fixed: rm system/windowmanager.conf ; sync ...Errors in the filesystem.
  • The window icon code is better able to deal with long icon names. Previously it printed the whole name on one long line.
  • When a user logs out of the window manager, all windows belonging to that user are destroyed
  • Fixed: Mouse driver initialization was sometimes causing the boot sequence to 'hang' a little bit -- wiggling the mouse or pressing keys was required to continue
  • The kernel log utility was losing some log messages that come early in the boot process, before the root filesystem is mounted.
  • Change start.o (.c) to crt0.o for more UNIX C compatibility.
  • Fixed: When running a command window, all the shell processes suddenly start hogging CPU. Was a case of 2 'ready' processes constantly yield()ing to one another. Changed the scheduler so that a process will get a low weight if it has yielded that timeslice before (a little different from the previous algorithm)

VERSION 0.2
03/06/2003

Overview: This release was a huge leap ahead from version 0.1 (and it took a long time, too). This release added a basic GUI, whereas version 0.1 was text-mode only. Really, the list of changes below is very incomplete -- Especially in listing new features.

  • Fixed: When rebooting from other operating systems such as Windows or Linux, Visopsys would triple-fault. Clearing the page cache seems to do the trick. Also changed the way page caching is done. Turned off write-through which improved the performance of the graphics as well.
  • Updated the shell 'help' text.
  • Fixed: Can't move/copy a file over top of another by the same name in a different location unless you specify the destination filename explicitly (i.e. if you just specify the directory, it fails)
  • When using the 'more' program, pressing [enter] to list a new line no longer leaves the "--More--(xx%)--" message on the screen
  • When a process has finished but is waiting for its child threads to terminate (i.e. mount), any process that is blocking on that process now stops waiting.
  • Fixed: Crashes when running the 'install' program, and other types of long disk writes. When this happened under the old exception handler, the handler used to go into an endless loop complaining about an exception in the idle process. This was the fault of the 'timed event scheduler'.  Got rid of that.
  • Fixed: The floppy motor was staying on all the time on many machines
  • Fixed: The FAT filesystem code was not properly filling all long filenames. They were cut off after some number of characters.
  • Fixed: When in the multitasker the killing of a process is delayed because of child threads, the process never seems to be killed when the children have all terminated. For example, when you mount a large FAT filesystem (C:), the thread that reads the FAT keeps the "mount" process alive, waiting, forever.
  • Fixed: When pushing some of the "non-printable" keys such as 'num lock' and then doing command history, the shell was backing up by one character before completing the filename.
  • Added support for non-fixed-width fonts in the kernelFont functions.
  • Added support for loading fonts. The system font looks lame on titles and whatnot, particularly on the login screen.
  • The login is now a little more meaningful in graphics mode. Previously, a console window would open with a login: prompt, but the user could happily start opening other command windows and such, and ignore the login (unless they wanted root permissions).
  • Added loading support for 24-bit bitmaps. We already saved in that format.
  • Fixed: Umounting a filesystem was not properly dereferencing either the filesystem or the disk. Couldn't mount->unmount->mount the same disk.
  • Changed the shell to do filename completions on the same line as the current line, rather than starting on the next line.
  • Implemented multiple text output streams, with the text input stream changing to the active window, so that we can have multiple text windows open at the same time
  • Implemented the FAT filesystem driver checking functionality [It's very primitive, but it does detect and fix some errors]
  • Moved the exception handler code into the multitasker. It really needs to interact with the multitasker quite a bit.
  • The new exception handler thread was hanging the terminal (breakable with CTRL-C) when the exception message happened at the bottom of the text area and caused the screen to scroll
  • The kernel's exception handler is now a spawned thread with its own stack, etc., so that it doesn't run as part of whatever process caused the exception in the first place. This helps to prevent the exception handler itself from crashing if things have gone seriously wrong with a process.
  • Adding permission checking to the kernel functions that are be exported to the rest of the world.
  • Fixed: The boot progress indicator was progressing beyond the end of the indicator
  • The 'getchar' routine now does the work of polling/yielding, rather than the programs that call it.
  • Added a basic 'fdisk' program that can do things like swap the active partition on hard disks
  • Fixed: The hard disk enumeration routine was crashing when there was more than one physical disk
  • Added the ability to copy directory trees in the filesystem functions, one level up from the filesystem driver. Could be a library routine instead someday.
  • Fixed: The 'cp' command was crashing when copying files involving the hard disk
  • Implemented the 'write' function in the IDE disk driver. Previously it was left out since the filesystem driver is still imperfect.
  • Fixed: Mounting hard disk partitions on my 30GB hard disk was not working.  LBA versus CHS issue
  • Fixed: The mouse driver initialization sometimes hung, waiting for a response from the mouse to a command
  • Added ELF executable capability and moved the programs to ELF format
  • Fixed: Incomplete filenames were still having an / appended to them by the shell.
  • The PS2 mouse driver and the keyboard driver now share a lock on the device, since they both deal with the same registers, etc.
  • Fixed: Sometimes an error in another program could cause a fault in the idle process (?!?), then the exception handler routines would get into an endless loop
  • Fixed: When a process created a new process, the unmapping of the new process' memory from the parent process space would sometimes cause a page fault.
  • Fixed: The 'log file updater' thread was been crashing frequently, most often when another process crashed
  • The scheduler no longer spawns a new idle thread while the multitasker is in the process of shutting down.
  • Fixed: The 'date' command was producing wrong results. The year, dotm, hour, minute, etc., were correct, but the month and dotw were wrong.
  • Fixed: When shortening a filename, one extra character from the old filename got left on the end of the new name. This was because of strncpy changes.
  • Fixed: There was a little sequencing error in the kernelMemoryManager's share memory routine -- it was deallocating the memory from the sharer process before allocating it to the sharee.
  • Simplified the default driver management. It was ridiculously overcomplicated.
  • Fixed: The FAT code that lowercases short filenames wasn't lowercasing the file extensions
  • Fixed: Most of the device driver initialization routines were being called twice; once in kernelDriverManagement.c and once in the abstraction layer initialization

VERSION 0.1
02/08/2001

Initial public release.

 

 

Home   About   News   Screenshots   Download   Developers   OS Development   Search
This site is copyright © 1999-2007, J. Andrew (Andy) McLaughlin
Visopsys and Visopsys.org are trademarks of J. Andrew McLaughlin
Last updated on January 06, 2007