Updated the README with information about the upcoming 0.6 release.
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README
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README
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@ -46,25 +46,98 @@ ocaml, and gzip, but the system isn't fully ready for such software yet.
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A number of small games is present and uses the VGA textmode to render ASCII
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graphics. Notably you can play two-player Pong, or single-player Snake, or the
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nice and turing-complete Conway's Game of Life. These are probably the main
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nice and Turing-complete Conway's Game of Life. These are probably the main
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attraction of the system for non-technical people.
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The Sortix kernel has very basic filesystem support. The root filesystem / is
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simply a single-directory RAM filesystem. The init ramdisk is mounted read-only
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on /bin and various devices are accessable through the /dev filesystem. Work is
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on /bin and various devices are accessible through the /dev filesystem. Work is
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underway to create an ext2 filesystem server, but it won't be of much use until
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the kernel virtual filesystem is completed in the 0.7dev development cycle.
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Job control and Unix signals is not fully or correctly implemented. This means
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that sequences such as Ctrl-C (SIGINT) not always works correctly. This will
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be implemented soon enough (depends partially on VFS; see above).
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There currently is no concept of users in the system (only the root user exists
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I decided to delay making a multi-user system until the base system is in place.
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Note that there is only a single terminal - even though the system is a
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multi-process system, there is only a single /dev/vga and there is no framework
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in place for sharing it.
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Improvements in Sortix 0.6
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--------------------------
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The 0.6 release improves greatly upon Sortix 0.5.
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* Implemented a ATA driver.
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* User-space programs can now use dynamic allocation.
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* Standard Error support.
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* Added a new terminal driver allowing standard input from keyboard.
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* Shell understands pipes, IO redirection and background processes.
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* COM ports are available as /dev/comN.
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* ls now formats files nicely in columns.
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* Added a paging program for displaying text-files page by page.
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* Support for call-traces in the kernel.
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* Fixes to avoid conflicts with GRUB.
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* Countless bug-fixes and small improvements.
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* Massive enhancements to the standard library.
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The 0.6 release drops support for the javascript virtual machine used to power
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amazing things such as jslinux. This is largely because Sortix has outgrown it
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and needs a less limited environment, in particular the lack of a VGA and that
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the keyboard events are truncated to that of serial connections is annoying and
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make it possible to keep the games compatible without severe performance
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penalties.
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Known bugs
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----------
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There is currently a lot of bugs and small quirks in Sortix. They are caused by
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the system being young and incomplete. They will gradually be fixed as the base
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system improves. They are tolerated in the releases because they are not
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critical and improvement situation from the last release.
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Job control and Unix signals is not fully or correctly implemented. This means
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that sequences such as Ctrl-C (SIGINT) not always works correctly. This will
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be implemented soon enough (depends partially on VFS; see above). Whenever you
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hit Ctrl-C the kernel attempts to terminate the currently running process (even
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if it isn't the foreground process). In addition, the kernel can only send
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signals to running processes. This means that that programs that read a line of
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input at a time from the terminal will not be terminated until you press enter.
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This will be fixed when proper support for kernel threads is added.
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The shell only looks at whitespace when parsing input lines. This means that
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operators such as & ; and | must be surrounded by whitespace on both sides.
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Support for quotes and escape characters is also not implemented yet. The shell
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does not accept very long lines yet.
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Transferring large binary streams over pipes may cause instability in the kernel
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due to a bug that wasn't fixed in time for the 0.6 release. In particular, the
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command $ cat /bin/cat | cat seems to trigger the issue occasionally. This bug
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will likely go away when I rewrite the kernel IO framework.
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Some programs change the format of the terminal standard input delivered to
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them. For instance, the pong game needs to capture every keyboard event. However
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running such programs at the same time as programs that need proper line-
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buffered input (such as the shell) causes conflicts and neither program gets
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what it needs causing programs to exit or crash. Note that if the shell fails
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to read in its expected format, it exits with an error code. When it does this
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the init process does too, and the kernel panics. This issue is caused by the
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design of the terminal system and can't be fixed until it is rewritten.
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The filesystem is currently hacked together in the kernel. When things go wrong
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you may experience the utilities returning the wrong error codes. This is
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harmless but confusing. All the current kernel filesystem code will be replaced
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a user-space filesystem framework and will be present in the next release.
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Improvements scheduled for Sortix 0.7
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-------------------------------------
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* Proper kernel threads.
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* Kernel virtual filesystem.
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* User-space filesystem framework.
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* User-space ext2 filesystem driver.
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* Refactor and extend the standard library.
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* Mount-points.
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* Environmental variables.
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* Improved terminal framework.
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* New and improved shell.
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* Copy-on-write in fork(2) and mmap(2).
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Technical details
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----------------
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The system is mostly coded in C++, but also contains a few files in C. However,
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