FreeNOS
This page is about FreeNOS (Free Niek's Operating System). FreeNOS is an experimental microkernel operating system for learning purposes, licensed under the GPLv3 .
News
Code moved to Git
All FreeNOS code has been moved to Git at googlecode. Git offers several benefits comparing to Subversion. See the Git Website for details.
Please use the following command to retrieve the FreeNOS code from googlecode:
$ git clone https://code.google.com/p/freenos
Kind regards,
Niek
0.1.0 Work In Progress
It's been quite a while since we posted anything here, time to do something
about that 
Here is the good news: we are working very hard on the next
FreeNOS release, version 0.1.0! We have decided to re-write the entire system from scratch, in C instead of C++.
This is because we think that C++ is a beautifull language, but too unnecessary complex
for our system. Althought it was a good experience to have tried this in a microkernel OS.
Together with the total rewrite of the kernel and parts of the userland, we are going to introduce the following interesting new things in FreeNOS:
- Multi-Arch support: x86, MIPS and ARM
- SMP support
- Kernel threads support
- Fault-Tolerance, a-la-MINIX 3.
- Address Space Layout Randomization
- Fully configurable builds (i.e. x86/pc with VGA console or x86/embedded with serial console)
Ofcourse, our system will be able to compile on all major OS's, including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. If you are interested, take a look at the current development code on SVN in the 'scratch' branch:
http://freenos.googlecode.com/svn/branches/scratch/
Cheers,
Niek
Busy, Busy, Busy
It's been some time since we posted something here, and not without reason. We are simply
extremely B-U-S-Y 
That's not a bad thing per definition, but it leaves little time
for FreeNOS so far. Nevertheless, we do our best to continue our work on 0.0.5. Most
likely, this release will not contain many new features, only improve what is already in FreeNOS.
This also means we're gonna try to make the system reliable, like Minix3!
Take care,
Niek
0.0.4 Released
After two months of hard work since we released 0.0.3 in July, we finally have a new version of FreeNOS! This release has new features, enhancements and bugfixes, including:
- Shared and Private Memory mappings support in MemoryServer
- Added Device and DeviceServer classes for easy driver programming (abstracts the IPC layer)
- Abstracted the IPC layer from FileSystems, Files and Directories (also with IOBuffer class)
- Simplified virtual FileSystems by using synchroneous I/O and Shared memory mappings.
- FileURI improvements in libparse
- ATA Host Controller support (read-only drive sectors)
- VGA device in /dev/vga0 (removed from Terminal)
- Keyboard device in /dev/keyboard0 (removed from Terminal)
- RTC Time device in /dev/time0
- Draft version of USB UHCI Host Controller in /dev/usb0
- PCI pseudo FileSystem implementation in /dev/pci
- GRUB pseudo FileSystem implementation in /dev/grub
- /etc/rc is now executed with /bin/sh by /sbin/init
- Reduced the number of programs in the BootImage (boot/boot.img.gz)
- Added basename(), chdir() and syslog() support to libposix
- Length modifier support for format strings in libc
- Extra Doxygen documentation
FreeNOS Interview at HAR(.FM) 2009!
The day has finally arrived: HAR 2009! We all got here yesterday, and are having a really great time. There are a LOT of interesting talks organized, cool workshops (especially lockpicking ;) and they even have their own radio station: HAR.FM.
Today, I met Luc Nieland of HAR.FM and he invited me for a live interview about FreeNOS! It was my first interview ever, but I really enjoyed it Click har-fm-interview.ogg to download the interview.
300,000 Page Hits in July!
We almost can't believe it, but it seems our webpage has been quite busy the last few weeks! TransIP statistics reported over 300,000 page hits total in July 2009, with an average of 11,000 page hits per day!
Announcement: New Bug Tracking System!
The last few days we've been looking at the issue list of Google Code and we decided that as of today we'd use the list of issues in favor of flyspray. Google Code's Issue list provides us with extended functionality Firefly doesn't provide, like for example integration with the version control where we can close issues from svn commit messages. The issue history has been moved to Google Code and we're ready to start using our new bug tracking system!
You can find more information about Google's IssueTracker at http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/IssueTracker.
Happy Summer Vacation!
The sun shines outside: summer is coming! Most of us are packing to
leave for a well-deserved vacation somewhere on an unknown island not
be mentioned here 
Anyway, work has already started on the next
release, and maybe we'll have our 0.0.4 ready end of this month.
I wish everyone a happy vacation, and meanwhile enjoy our news entry on OSNews.com !
0.0.3 Released
This version includes a new filesystem written from scratch: LinnFS. It is roughly based on the Extended FileSystem. It is now used as the root filesystem on the LiveCD instead of Ext2. Additionally, the notion of current directory has been implemented. Finally, this release has also been tested on the latest Nexenta distribution.
Website has moved to TransIP
Today, the website has been successfully moved to TransIP !
