Added RAM disk booting for coreboot/SeaBIOS support in Qemu, and potentially PXE booting in the future. Create an empty file named ‘ramdisk’ in the root directory of the boot floppy image to trigger this feature.
When the root filesystem is read-only (e.g. an ISO image), a RAM disk is created and mounted on /temp, for programs that need to be able to create temporary files to work properly. This depends on the ‘kernel.conf’ file specifying a variable ‘ramdisk.readonly.temp’ with a non-zero size (currently 10MB by default).
Did a refresh of the kernel’s APIC driver in response to bug reports. Made a number of improvements to get it closer to the specification and to real-world systems.
Centralized the interrupt system’s sharing and chaining mechanism in kernelInterrupt.c and removed the need for individual device drivers to manage these. Removed the kernelInterruptGetHandler() function and added the kernelInterruptNextHandler() function for chaining. Added the kernelSysTimerHook() function for hooking or restoring the system timer interrupt at kernel startup or shutdown time.
Added support for the X86 Page Attribute Table feature, and changed the kernelPageSetAttrs() function to allow for more abstract, but enhanced memory page caching options. Various drivers now use it to designate memory-mapped register space as “strong uncacheable”, and the framebuffer graphic driver to request “write-combining” for better performance.
Added the equivalent of ‘loopback’ functionality for real network devices so that it’s possible to, for example, ping our own IP address.
Changed the Visopsys library’s linkedList functionality so that the linkedListAdd() function has been replaced by linkedListAddFront() and linkedListAddBack(). Thus the caller must specify whether a new item gets added to the front or the back of the list.
Significantly re-engineered the ‘Edit’ text editor program. It’s much more realistically usable now: it mostly works, supports the Home, End, and PgUp, and PgDown keys, and no longer does automatic line-wrapping, although it doesn’t yet support horizontal scrolling.
Changed the ‘import’ (-i) and ‘export’ (-e) operations in the command-line version of the font editor (fontutil) so that they work with directories of individual glyph image files, rather than a single image file with a grid of glyphs.
Because of their propensity for sharing interrupt pins, PCI devices now have their interrupt generating capability disabled by default, and drivers must enable it by calling kernelBusDeviceEnable().
Improved error handling and messages for command-line and text mode operation (perror and errno).
Added proper keyboard support for the ‘Home’ and ‘End’ keys, for applications that want to use them.
The networking IPv4 code has been changed to use the IANA-specified range of numbers (49152 to 65535) for ‘ephemeral’ (temporary, private, ‘dynamic’) ports.
Added a driverGetFeatures() function to the multiprocessor driver, and when disabling the PIC in favour of APICs, the PIC driver now checks for the presence of an IMCR in the multiprocessor features, and disables it.
Added a generic kernelCpuGetFeatures() to the CPU driver interface, for returning a structure of model-specific features. Only for X86 (32/64) processors at the moment, and intended to reduce the need for calling the X86 ‘cpuid’ instruction directly in other places.
Added a kernelWindowComponentAppendData() function (windowComponentAppendData() in user space) that allows the caller to append rather than completely replace the data in a supported component. Currently implemented only in the windowList component.
Added the new kernel networking functions kernelNetworkConnectionGetCount() and kernelNetworkConnectionGetAll() (networkConnectionGetCount() and networkConnectionGetAll() in user space, respectively) to return information about current network connections.
Added the feof() function to the standard C library.
Moved the <sys/sched.h> header file to <sched.h> where it should have been in the first place.
Removed the kernel multitasker’s kernelMultitaskerSetProcessParent() function. The surviving children of a process that’s being killed are re-parented to their grandparents. There should be no more orphan processes, and it should always be possible to trace the lineage of processes back to their oldest living ancestor, making the kernelMultitaskerPropagateEnvironment() function work as intended, and making it unnecessary for the window shell to re-parent processes.
Removed the unused kernel text input functions kernelTextInputStreamPeek(), kernelTextInputPeek(), kernelTextInputStreamRemove(), kernelTextInputRemove(), kernelTextInputStreamRemoveN(), and kernelTextInputRemoveN() (textInputStreamRemove(), textInputRemove(), textInputStreamRemoveN(), and textInputRemoveN(), respectively, in user space).
Fixed: When using the ‘view’ program to look at little mouse pointer images, the window – specifically the title bar – was too small for the buttons and whatnot. The autoSizeWindow() function now respects the minimum width of any title bar.
Fixed: Doing a ‘set data’ on a disabled text field could cause the new text to be drawn as if the component were enabled.
Fixed: Attempting to use the ‘shutdown’ program as a non-privileged user was crashy.
Fixed: Clicking on a keymap file that wasn’t in the system keymap folder would launch the Keyboard Map program, but it wouldn’t open the clicked file, but rather attempt to match a map in the system keymap folder.
Fixed: Paging-related error messages when running the ‘Devices’ (lsdev) program from the command line. Also fixed a separate-but-related memory leak by destroying the attributes variable list of each device as we finish with it, when recursively walking the device tree.
Fixed: In the file browser, empty files had directory icons.
Fixed: The error recovery if device detection and setup fails in the generic network device layer, or in the PcNet ethernet driver. Also fixed the Network Devices (ifconfig) program to better handle the case where there are no network devices.
Fixed: The kernelNetworkRead() function (networkRead() in user space) so that it is possible to read remaining buffered data from a connection that has been closed (e.g. by the other host).
Fixed: Corrected the non-blocking behaviour of the C library networking function recv().
Fixed: Some minor off-by-one errors in the C library’s strlen() and strnlen() functions, related to the MAXSTRINGLENGTH limit.
Fixed: A spurious memory deallocation error message that occurred when the only floppy drive was of an unsupported type (e.g. ATAPI).
Fixed: An unlikely crash that could happen when the login program was unable to log in to the window system, despite having successfully authenticated with valid credentials.
Fixed: Errors in the assert() macro in <assert.h>.
Fixed: Several of the programs didn’t have .pot translation files.
Fixed: the kernel’s static library dependencies in the build.
