lunes, 21 de marzo de 2011

SqueakNOS release updated!

We are glad to announce that we have just uploaded an updated version of SqueakNOS to our site. You can find the updated download links here.

This release adds the following items to the previous version: (99.9% modeled with objects)

- Improved support for ATA devices access
- Implementation of a model of files and directories
- Implementation of FAT32 filesystem
- Support for reading sources from the hard disk
- Support for X86 paging setup and handling of page faults
- Implementation of a model of free and used memory
- Implementation of image snapshotting (based on the paging mechanism)
- Based on Pharo, but also supporting Squeak and Cuis
- Added some primitives for communicating between VM and image
- Support for Alien and FFI
- Added basic support for writing to serial via VM so that it's possiblo to out debug info to the outside world.
- Added pretty basic ATA benchmarks
- Added some scripts to automatize work done from the outside world
- Many code cleanups

Future directions are:

- Support for Cog VM
- Investigate replacing SqueakNOS plugin with NativeBoost so that we do more on the image
- Offloading memory pages to disk
- More tests
- Benchmarks

For the brave ones, remember that you can always generate a SqueakNOS image by using the ConfigurationOfSqueakNOS (which is a bit outdated now), or by manually loading the packages from monticello. Also to generate a SqueakNOS VM download its code from GIT (hosted on sourceforge.net).

Don't forget to visit squeaknos.blogspot.com for news and instructions. We hope to be able to write more soon. Have fun!

Many thank's t all the people who made it possible to understand the code and to develop all this.

SqueakNOS' Team