Where 1.1.x Is At
Networking kind of mostly works, multithreading sorta works, graphical programs almost kind of work ….
It’s basically everything that a real OS needs to be but only in it’s rawest form and with a lot of bugs/limitations remaining to fix.
There aren’t many drivers, but it should still work on real hardware (hopefully any recent 64-bit RISC-V compatible) as well as in emulators (RVVM for current desktop testing) and is being steadily improved.
Some useful programs like a vi implementation have been ported and a new package manager has already been designed but these are limited and not
Where I’d Like To Be
Obviously I want to have a full desktop system with a bunch of hardware drivers and some useful network programs and some games and system tools ready for an imminent 1.2 release, but perfecting all of these aspects will not be possible in the short term.
What To Expect In Upcoming Releases
Either the next releases will be in-development 1.1.x versions without much release engineering or will be a stripped down 1.2 release with only the most critical features perfected.
- No games/multimedia apps yet
- Games are important for stress-testing features and for making technical demos “fun”, but aren’t the top priority while I’ve got more critical features to finish
- I might break this rule to sneak some simple “toy” games in especially if it’s useful for testing, but don’t expect much in the way of colourful 3D action yet
- More system tools
- A formal test suite is needed to plan more reliable releases
- Performance monitoring & debugging tools are needed in order to do more testing in-place
- Other basic tools need to be written to demonstrate the desktop system: a menu of some kind, a file browser, a terminal etc.
- These will all be released soon in an early state
- Some focus on text & fonts
- The system should start to become more useful for code editing
- A built-in documentation system will be implemented that should help explain each release (rather than repeating things in blog posts)
- A visual style of the OS will start to arise in this time, but as per previous post this won’t have a great focus on consistency (e.g. more critical apps might use simpler fonts etc.)
- More driver groundwork
- I don’t have time to finish drivers for every device I want to make usable but I can probably finish some stuff like PCI bus & flexible interrupt handling while completing other tasks
Leave a Reply