Software update: Visopsys 0.6

Andy McLaughlin has been working on the Visopsys operating system since 1997 and recently released version 0.6. The operating system has a full implementation for multitasking, 100% protected mode and virtual-memory and, according to the developer, has a massively monolithic style kernel. There is a small selection of applications available for this platform, where the extensive Disk Manager stands out with which partitions can be created and modified without any problems. For a complete overview of the how and what, we refer you to this page. The announcement and list of changes of version 0.6 are as follows:

This release introduces a host of new functionality including a cleaned up desktop with icons for browsing the computer, file systems, and administrative tasks, FAT defragmenting, ELF dynamic linking, a built in chain-boot loader and simple MBR formatting, file browsing widgets and dialogs, Windows .ico icon file support, a generic file viewing program, Italian keyboard support, new icons and a new splash screen.

• Added a ‘Computer’ icon, equivalent to the one in Linux or ‘My Computer’ in Windows. It shows the different disks, auto-mounts them (if applicable) when clicked, and launches a file browser.
• Added a ‘File Browser’ icon.
• Added an ‘Administration’ icon which brings up a window for various other programs that were previously on the default desktop.
• The ‘view’ program is now a more generic program for default viewing of various sorts of files.
• Added defragmenting capability to the FAT filesystem driver.
• Implemented shared libraries and dynamically linked executables. All included libraries and programs are now dynamic.
• Implemented a simple, chain-loading MBR boot menu for loading from different partitions and operating systems. The ‘bootmenu’ program lets the user edit the menu strings and set parameters. Also accessible from the Disk Manager. ** Note that this will NOT load any Linux installation that uses an initrd.
• Implemented simple MBR code, so that for example the Disk Manager can be used to rescue a system from a deleted or corrupt GRUB installation.
• Added .ico icon file format support and converted many existing icons to that format.
• Created file browsing widgets/dialogs.
• There is a new splash screen image and a number of new icons.
• Text areas now use white background and blue text as the default colors.
• Added Davide Airaghi’s Italian keyboard mapping.
• Some preliminary networking support has been added, but for the moment it is disabled by default. The only network device driver provided is for the “Lance” (AMD PC-NET) card, which can be simulated under VMWare. In the ‘Administration’ window, there is now a ‘Network’ icon that proves access to a simple ‘Network Devices’ program which, for now, just shows devices, status, settings, dynamic (via DHCP) IP address, etc. There is also a ‘ping’ command.
• The new exception handler prints out more diagnostic information (exception type, and more)
• There is now a vsh library function for a text mode progress bar.
• The format program now shows a progress bar in text mode.
• The Disk Manager will refuse outright, or warn/confirm before moving, formatting, or deleting mounted partitions.
• The ‘disks’ command now shows mount points.
• Created an ‘iconwin’ program that uses config files to create custom windows with icons, and user-specified actions associated with them.
• Added a /CREDITS.txt file for listing others’ contributions.
• There is now a /system/mouse/ directory for mouse pointer images, a /system/config/ directory for .conf files of all programs and the kernel, a /system/mount directory for automatic mounting, and a /system/wallpaper directory for background images.
• Created a ‘progress dialog’ window library feature that utilizes the ‘progress’ structure and shows a progress bar and status messages.
• The exception handler is no longer a standalone task, in order to do FPU state saves/restores without setting the CR0[TS] bit.
• Handles exceptions generated when a process attempts to do floating point operations after a task switch.
• The filesystem structure is now contained within the logical disk structure.
• The user-space ‘disk’ object now indicates whether a partition is mounted, and if so, the mount point.
• Exported a portion of the kernelDevice structure as a new ‘device’ structure, and created API functions to export the hardware device tree.
• ‘Atomized’ some of the ASM macros in kernelProcessorX86.h so that they can be reused in other more complex macros
• Added floorf(), sin(), cos(), and tan() functions to the C lib.
• Added support for %b format specifiers in the _xpndfmt.c functions by adding another bogus C library routine (itob).
• File changes: Changed ‘kernelMiscFunctions.*’ to ‘kernelMisc.*’, and the kernelPageManager and kernelMemoryManager have had the ‘Manager’ bit taken out of their file/function names.
• Added window library functions to clear an event handler and to get the window thread PID
• Implemented a ‘progress’ data structure that can be passed to (for example) long filesystem operations such as format, check, resize.
• The ‘map to free’ functionality of the paging code no longer, by default, allocates the first page in the address space. This makes it easier to detect/guide against NULL pointer dereferences.
• Got rid of the ‘diskType’ and ‘mediaType’ enums from the various disk structures, and instead use a set of logical flags to describe disks.
• Removed the deprecated windowPack() and windowSetPacked() API functions.
• Fixed: In the Disk Manager, canceling a new partition creation at the label type stage caused 2 changes to show as pending.
• Fixed: The Disk Manager’s partition reordering menu didn’t display changes properly in text mode. It worked but the changes weren’t reflected in the menu.
• Fixed: The lost+found directory created by the EXT2 formatting code was not readable when we mounted the filesystem. Also, the permissions are now set to the same values ​​as Linux mke2fs.
• Fixed: Using the ‘gcc version 3.4.2’ and ‘ld version 2.15.92.0.2’ combo (Fedora Core 3), generated programs had a new, unexpected number (3) of ELF program header entries.
• Fixed: Selecting partition/list types in the Disk Manager could crash the program.
• Fixed: The Program Manager was associating some child threads with the wrong parents in the process list.

[break]Visopsys 0.6 is available in the following flavours:
ISO image
Floppy image
Source