OSDev.org

Pedigree: Foster - now available!

What is Pedigree?
The Pedigree Project aims to develop a solid yet portable operating system from the ground up with an object oriented architecture where possible. The goal is to support multiple different subsystems to allow many different applications to run natively on Pedigree. Further goals include portability across multiple different architectures (x86, amd64, PPC, MIPS and ARM), a unique graphical user interface, and support for a variety of popular driver interfaces to improve hardware support.

Who develops Pedigree?
The core team who has been working on the project up until now consists of James Molloy (JamesM), Jörg Pfähler (bluecode, who left the project in early 2009, but wrote a significant amount of core code in the kernel before he left), and Matthew Iselin (pcmattman). Eduard Burtescu (eddyb) has contributed significantly to the project in the months leading up to this release.

This release has truly been a team effort, and without the unique combination of the various skills presented by each member of the team, this release would not have been possible.

What are Foster's key features?
Foster's key features include:

• Powerful text-based user interface with support for multiple consoles and Freetype font rendering.
• POSIX subsystem capable of running Apache and Python (though Apache is not available for use in Foster)
• TCP/IP network stack with the standard Berkeley sockets interface for applications

Where do I get it from?
You can get the Foster image from the http://www.pedigree-project.org/project ... iki/Foster page on the project website.

Where can I get support? What if I want to report a bug, or request a feature?
The easiest way is to visit the issue tracker, sign up, and file a new issue. Your feedback and bug reports help us improve our system, so by all means file report anything you run into. If however you do not wish to sign up on another website, or you cannot for some reason, you can contact the development team directly in #pedigree on irc.freenode.net.

We've had a lot of fun developing Foster, and we hope you'll have a lot of fun using it.
-- The Pedigree Team

Awesome! I'm downloading the image now(and bochs and qemu since I recently upgraded this system)

This looks really impressive. I think you may get a niche part of the OS market with a few more months of work(surely you can pass Minix 3's share)..

But this is pretty hardcore, TCP/IP and python and all sorts of stuff.. So does Apache require some patches to get running on the Pedigree or by "not included in Foster" do you mean that it's just not included on the image?

Congratulations on the first release.

Downloading the ISO as I'm typing this. My expectations are high based on the screenshots I've seen in the past!

Congratz on the release! I hope there aren't two many problems with it.

Two issues:
1. Hopefully this isn't another problem with ctrl-c but, when I ran ls -l -R and ctrl-c'd it I got a Breakpoint exception. Backtrace was posixsubsystem::exit -> Process::kill -> fail. However, I was not able to reproduce it.

2. I don't really like the default prompt ...but thats not all that important.

Other than that it's great. Hope it all goes well

-JL

What do you mean by the default prompt?

If you don't like the message, change /config/greeting. If you don't like the colors, change the schema

OrOS wrote:What do you mean by the default prompt?

If you don't like the message, change /config/greeting. If you don't like the colors, change the schema

I mean the bash prompt for the root user better. And I know I can change it, but, eh.

-JL

Great work! As always, Pedigree impresses.

I only found one small problem, when I was playing with the python interpreter.

Backtrace: This happened when I pressed Ctrl-C to kill the interpreter after running Hope this helps.

I had high expectations when testing this, and I must say, not only where they met you set new standards. Very well built.

I don't like the speed at which it runs though, it's pretty slow in my opinion.

But it's a very nice OS. Way better than most hobby OSs.

However, it does have its faults,

Bugs:
- When logging in pressing anything non-alphanumeric causes strange characters to be printed.
- In python,
"import socket
tcp = socket.socket()
exit()"

will cause a page fault, I can get a backtrace if you need it.

I'm looking forward to seeing future releases, with a few more months of development I wouldn't be surprised to see this having part of the market share.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for trying out Pedigree and letting us know some of the problems you've run into. We're working now on fixing a lot of the bugs that have been reported on the forums, in IRC, and on our website issue tracker.

Unfortunately however, the original release image was slightly corrupted (mostly invisible, but I have received reports of one or two applications failing to run). This has since been rectified, and I just uploaded a new ISO image. You can download it at the same place as the original ISO image. I've also added compressed versions for those who find 130 MB to be rather large to download.

Thanks again!
-- The Pedigree Team

Hi,

AUsername wrote:I don't like the speed at which it runs though, it's pretty slow in my opinion.

There's a reason for that. The entire interface is rendered using freetype. This was originally just to provide full unicode support, but we enabled antialiasing and as such we can't do a lot of the speedup hacks that can be done with pure bitmap fonts.

There are plenty of short-circuits and hacks to speed things up, but blasting antialiased text onto a VBE display is never going to be lightning fast. Most operations are slowed down by the user interface.

Cheers,

James

I'm pretty late, but I'm downloading the image now. About to test on at least four different hardware platforms. If possible, I'll also run it on several of the PC in my Uni lab. Be back within the next few days to report on how it went.

Great work, and a really promising project.

-All the best
gravaera.

So does Apache require some patches to get running on the Pedigree

Not quite - it's just rather large, so we decided not to put it on the final image. The image already 130 MB uncompressed, we didn't want to increase that further!

pcmattman wrote:

So does Apache require some patches to get running on the Pedigree

Not quite - it's just rather large, so we decided not to put it on the final image. The image already 130 MB uncompressed, we didn't want to increase that further!

So, you know whats next then. Package Management!!

We already have package management, but we ran into problems in the days leading up to release with integrity checks on the packages in the system which meant it wasn't actually possible to install packages. We also considered a package manager in Foster to be pointless as the ATA driver is "crippled" (ie, actual write disabled, they just go to the cache).

The set of packages we included on the final image is a large subset of the packages that would be in the package repositories.