Visopsys 0.91 Released

[andymc]

Available on the download page.

https://visopsys.org/download/

From the change log (https://visopsys.org/download/change-log/):

Overview: This maintenance release fixes RAM disk boot support, adds sparse file support to the EXT filesystem driver, and updates various build-related things.

• Added support for sparse files to the EXT filesystem driver.
• Fixed some problems with the RAM disk boot feature, first introduced in version 0.85.
• Added a cross-compiling toolchain to the build system, to reduce the fragility of relying on the host system’s compiler and associated programs, and fixed a number of warnings and errors that emerged from that.
• Updated the administration.conf files for German, Spanish, Russian, and Turkish.
• Updated sources and fixed some warnings and errors, when building with GCC versions 7 through 10.
• Added a kernel linker script, so that we have finer control over the layout of the kernel binary.
• Isolated architecture-dependent code and parameterized the build system with the architecture. For now, still just 32-bit x86.
• Renamed the floppy image file to include the word ‘floppy’.
• Factored some code in the BIOS OS loader and fixed some rounding errors.
• Added byte offsets to various structures described in <sys/elf.h>.
• Removed the unused kernel function kernelSysTimerWaitTicks().

[ronaldlees]

Hi Andy,
Hope you are well in these times. Thanks for the update v.91 - will have to see if it'll compile for me OK.

[andymc]

Thanks Ron,

I hope you and yours have been keeping well.

There's a new way to compile: first building a cross-compiling toolchain (binutils and gcc) from sources, as a kind of one-time operation. It's described in the updated BUILDING.txt.

The vagaries of relying on whatever compiler configuration is installed on a build machine became too much, when I upgraded my Mint workstation and couldn't build a working system. I did discover the cause in the end, and could probably have fixed it with a compile flag, but long-term I think this is a good step.

Andy

[Uityyy]

Real-hardware usage report:

I downloaded the 0.91 ISO and attempted to boot it on three different machines:
- A Celeron M laptop with an IDE hard disk and a flaky DVD drive.
- A desktop with both IDE and SATA drives
- A Toshiba laptop from 2009.

On all three machines Visopsys failed to figure out how to read its own CD in a variety of different ways. I've had impressively bad luck getting Visopsys to talk to real disk drives across multiple computers and multiple Visopsys releases. Before I delve into the specific failure states of specific machines, do you have any advice on what hardware is known to *not* have problems booting Visopsys?

[andymc]

Hello Uityyy

Thanks for the report

It's been quite a while since I used Visopsys to boot a physical CD/DVD. I don't think I even have an IDE one anymore.

I do remember this being a particular struggle with IDE. At one point I took a week off work, took my stack of old laptops, and tried to get the IDE driver working with all of them. The CD-ROM drives were particularly troublesome. So much so that I probably would have needed to start supporting different IDE drivers with different systems -- such were the incompatibilities.

I thought my SATA driver was quite a lot more reliable though. It didn't get a lot of testing on many different physical systems however, since I didn't have many at my disposal.

Unfortunately I don't maintain a list of known working systems and non-. It would be pretty out of date by now, I'm sure. That stack of old (IDE) laptops eventually went to the rubbish tip for recycling

I do wonder how many people might actually burn a Visopsys ISO to a disc nowadays. I haven't had a report like this for quite some time. I would have thought that bootable USB sticks (or even USB CD/DVD -- I think I got that working?) would be much more prevalent today. Probably the USB options will be better supported in Visopsys.

[Uityyy]

Well, this here weirdo who likes ISOs so much that he keeps nearly 60 physical disks of operating systems within easy reach near his computer took until about last week to actually try Visopsys on a USB thumb drive, but I am glad to report it worked perfectly where the CD did not. New machine this time, HP t510 Thin Client running a Via Eden 2 x86_64 CPU.

[andymc]

Oh yes, I don't think ISO images are going away any time soon -- I just didn't think many people would be burning them to physical media

Great that the USB worked well for you though, thanks for letting me know!