OSDev.org

Hey,

Just released a release candidate for Exclaim 0.3. It'd be great if it could get some testing before I release the final version.

New features (not a complete list)

• AMD64 port
• Dynamic linking
• Signals
• Block cache for block devices
• Ext2 filesystem write support
• ISO9660 + Joliet filesystem support
• Symbolic link support in VFS
• PCI driver
• Improved ATA driver, uses the PCI driver for detection, supports ATAPI devices
• New terminal driver, supports a lot more escape sequences, implements POSIX termios stuff
• Simple kernel debugger
• Hard disk installation support
• Lots of bugs fixed

Software ports

• Bash
• GCC/Binutils/Make
• Ncurses + Nano
• Grep
• Sed
• BSD tar + libarchive
• Ruby (currently has a bug that causes it to segfault occassionally, I'm going to look into it - can be worked around by placing GC.disable at the start of the script)
• Cairo graphics library (without font rendering support). There are test apps using it in the installation (cairotest-image, cairotest-video and pngdisplay) as well as their source code.

It's possible to compile Exclaim from inside itself - the source is included in the installation, just run 'make config' from /User/Source/exclaim, configure it for the architecture you're running, and run 'make all-kernel all-drivers' to compile the kernel/drivers. Userspace won't build because of a mistake in my string.h, which I'll fix for the final release. There are a few other known bugs that I've seen (see release notes link), but if anyone else sees them could you let me know in this thread?

To get access to all the stuff included, installation to a hard disk is required. I guess not many people will want to install to a hard disk on a real box, but if anyone could it would be great. Even if you don't want to install to the hard disk, I'd still be grateful if you could boot the installation CD (it boots into a Bash shell) and try it out a bit from there to see if anything bad happens

For people testing in emulators, the download page has a preformatted hard disk image that can be installed to. I've mentioned in the release notes that the installation filesystem should be formatted without the ext_attr feature enabled - this is because the Ext2 driver doesn't handle this feature and I've seen it cause a few fsck errors (inode/block reference counts wrong) with the feature enabled.

Links

• Home page - http://www.exclaim-project.org/
• Download - http://www.exclaim-project.org/index.ph ... t=view&m=2 (look at the Test Release section at the bottom)
• Release notes - http://trac.exclaim-project.org/wiki/release03rc1
• Bug tracker/wiki - http://trac.exclaim-project.org/
• Some screenshots - http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?p=144666#p144666

Thanks a lot to anyone who tests!
Alex

EDIT: Forgot to mention - Cairo can only operate in 32-bit video modes. If you get an error about cannot find video mode in QEMU, run QEMU with '-std-vga'

pngdisplay needs, also, 32bit video modes. and for some versions of qemu is -vga std, not -std-vga
looks good, but has his problems .
i wait for the final, as rc1 have big install problems.
eddyb.