Recent News

Kernel version 0.6.1

24-Apr-2009
This version includes some basic enhancements that are necessary to improve other kernel parts in the near future. One of those enhancements is the new minimal support for the parallel port line printer driver (/dev/lp0), that will help to debug kernel messages during the adaptation of the X Window System support.

Among the new remount capability in the sys_mount() system call, this version includes a bit more of new support in the procfs filesystem with the inclusion of the /proc/cpuinfo, /proc/interrupts, /proc/meminfo and /proc/stat files. With the existence of those new files, now there are some programs that don't complain anymore and execute correctly. One of them is the top applet of the Busybox (included in the floppy image).

Finally many part of the kernel code has been improved and rewritten and some important bugs were fixed, making this version a bit more stable than its predecessor.

As always the Changelog has all the details.

Kernel version 0.6.0

11-Mar-2009
A lot of work has been done since the last release and that's why this is another major version. The most important one is the completely changed kernel address space. Taking advantage of the Tim Robinson's GDT idea, I've rewritten almost all the memory code to accomodate the same memory layout as in Linux. The result is that the kernel continues being loaded at the physical address 0x100000 (1MB) but is now compiled to run at the virtual address 0xC0000000 (3GB). So, the default user space is 3GB in size leaving only 1GB for the kernel space. This means that kernel will not be able to address more than 1GB at that moment.

The next important change is the built-in support for RAMdisk devices. By default the kernel creates 1 RAMdisk (/dev/ram) of 4MB in size. This new support comes with two new kernel boot parameters ramdisk_size=nnnn and noramdisk. The first one is used to change the size of the RAMdisk, where nnnn is the size expressed in 1024-byte blocks. The second parameter is used to disable completely the RAMdisk support.

The last important change is the new support for the Rock Ridge extension in the ISO9660 filesystem. With this support the Fiwix kernel is now able to boot from an ISO9660 root filesystem, using the rootfstype kernel boot parameter. Currently it doesn't detects automatically the IDE device where the CDROM is attached, so if you plan to use the newly created Fiwix Live-CD image, you may need to change the default device (/dev/hdc) during the GRUB boot screen.

The following is a representation of all this new support: 

# mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom
ISO 9660 Extensions: RRIP_1991A
# l /mnt/cdrom/
dr-xr-xr-x    3 root     root         6144 Dec 15  2006 bin
-r--r--r--    1 root     root         2048 Feb 18 14:40 boot.catalog
dr-xr-xr-x    3 root     root         8192 Feb 16 19:11 dev
dr-xr-xr-x    5 root     root         4096 Feb 16 19:02 etc
-r--r--r--    1 root     root      1474560 Feb 18 14:40 fiwix.img
-r--r--r--    1 root     root        88009 Oct 12  2003 install.log
dr-xr-xr-x    3 root     root         2048 Feb 28  2002 lib
dr-xr-xr-x    3 root     root         2048 Jul 10  2002 lost+found
dr-xr-xr-x    6 root     root         2048 Feb 16 19:05 mnt
dr-xr-xr-x    3 root     root         2048 Feb 16 19:04 proc
dr-xr-xr-x    4 root     root         2048 May  2  2007 root
dr-xr-xr-x    3 root     root         4096 Jul 30  2007 sbin
dr-xr-xr-x   12 root     root         2048 Jun  8  2001 usr
# df
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/fd0                  1440      1036       404  72% /
/dev/hdc                 52112     52112         0 100% /mnt/cdrom
As always, it has been fixed a lot of bugs and improved a lot of code, so all of this makes this version a big step forward towards to the next challenge, the EXT2 filesystem write support.

As an example of that, the following is a representation of how good looking is the ps command of Busybox: 

# ps
  PID  Uid     VmSize Stat Command
    1 root        244 S   init
    2 root            SW  [kswapd]
   19 root        428 S   -sh
   20 root        260 S   init
   24 root        344 R   ps
Finally but not least, the Fiwix web site now includes RSS feeds for those that want to stay tunned on this site. This feature allows users to track new releases with their favorite RSS Reader.