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Updated the README with information about the upcoming 0.6 release.

This commit is contained in:
Jonas 'Sortie' Termansen 2012-03-18 21:36:11 +01:00
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commit 051ec170f5
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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.
A number of small games is present and uses the VGA textmode to render ASCII
graphics. Notably you can play two-player Pong, or single-player Snake, or the
nice and turing-complete Conway's Game of Life. These are probably the main
nice and Turing-complete Conway's Game of Life. These are probably the main
attraction of the system for non-technical people.
The Sortix kernel has very basic filesystem support. The root filesystem / is
simply a single-directory RAM filesystem. The init ramdisk is mounted read-only
on /bin and various devices are accessable through the /dev filesystem. Work is
on /bin and various devices are accessible through the /dev filesystem. Work is
underway to create an ext2 filesystem server, but it won't be of much use until
the kernel virtual filesystem is completed in the 0.7dev development cycle.
Job control and Unix signals is not fully or correctly implemented. This means
that sequences such as Ctrl-C (SIGINT) not always works correctly. This will
be implemented soon enough (depends partially on VFS; see above).
There currently is no concept of users in the system (only the root user exists
I decided to delay making a multi-user system until the base system is in place.
Note that there is only a single terminal - even though the system is a
multi-process system, there is only a single /dev/vga and there is no framework
in place for sharing it.
Improvements in Sortix 0.6
--------------------------
The 0.6 release improves greatly upon Sortix 0.5.
* Implemented a ATA driver.
* User-space programs can now use dynamic allocation.
* Standard Error support.
* Added a new terminal driver allowing standard input from keyboard.
* Shell understands pipes, IO redirection and background processes.
* COM ports are available as /dev/comN.
* ls now formats files nicely in columns.
* Added a paging program for displaying text-files page by page.
* Support for call-traces in the kernel.
* Fixes to avoid conflicts with GRUB.
* Countless bug-fixes and small improvements.
* Massive enhancements to the standard library.
The 0.6 release drops support for the javascript virtual machine used to power
amazing things such as jslinux. This is largely because Sortix has outgrown it
and needs a less limited environment, in particular the lack of a VGA and that
the keyboard events are truncated to that of serial connections is annoying and
make it possible to keep the games compatible without severe performance
penalties.
Known bugs
----------
There is currently a lot of bugs and small quirks in Sortix. They are caused by
the system being young and incomplete. They will gradually be fixed as the base
system improves. They are tolerated in the releases because they are not
critical and improvement situation from the last release.
Job control and Unix signals is not fully or correctly implemented. This means
that sequences such as Ctrl-C (SIGINT) not always works correctly. This will
be implemented soon enough (depends partially on VFS; see above). Whenever you
hit Ctrl-C the kernel attempts to terminate the currently running process (even
if it isn't the foreground process). In addition, the kernel can only send
signals to running processes. This means that that programs that read a line of
input at a time from the terminal will not be terminated until you press enter.
This will be fixed when proper support for kernel threads is added.
The shell only looks at whitespace when parsing input lines. This means that
operators such as & ; and | must be surrounded by whitespace on both sides.
Support for quotes and escape characters is also not implemented yet. The shell
does not accept very long lines yet.
Transferring large binary streams over pipes may cause instability in the kernel
due to a bug that wasn't fixed in time for the 0.6 release. In particular, the
command $ cat /bin/cat | cat seems to trigger the issue occasionally. This bug
will likely go away when I rewrite the kernel IO framework.
Some programs change the format of the terminal standard input delivered to
them. For instance, the pong game needs to capture every keyboard event. However
running such programs at the same time as programs that need proper line-
buffered input (such as the shell) causes conflicts and neither program gets
what it needs causing programs to exit or crash. Note that if the shell fails
to read in its expected format, it exits with an error code. When it does this
the init process does too, and the kernel panics. This issue is caused by the
design of the terminal system and can't be fixed until it is rewritten.
The filesystem is currently hacked together in the kernel. When things go wrong
you may experience the utilities returning the wrong error codes. This is
harmless but confusing. All the current kernel filesystem code will be replaced
a user-space filesystem framework and will be present in the next release.
Improvements scheduled for Sortix 0.7
-------------------------------------
* Proper kernel threads.
* Kernel virtual filesystem.
* User-space filesystem framework.
* User-space ext2 filesystem driver.
* Refactor and extend the standard library.
* Mount-points.
* Environmental variables.
* Improved terminal framework.
* New and improved shell.
* Copy-on-write in fork(2) and mmap(2).
Technical details
----------------
The system is mostly coded in C++, but also contains a few files in C. However,