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| Thu 12 Sep 2002 |
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The server will be down at least from Friday 13th to Monday
16th due to moving. Might longer to, depending on how long it takes to get the
network up and running in the new offices.
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| Fri 2 Aug 2002 |
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Figured a little hello from me was due time : ) As you
might have noticed, not much has happened here the last
many months. At first I was just tired of AtheOS and needed
a break. Then I joined a theory-course and started taking
flying lessons in order to get a pilot-licence. During
that periode I did not have time to work on AtheOS. When
I was done with my theory exams in March I tried getting
started again, but got very dissapointed and lost all
motivation when the first thing I read about after getting
some hickups in my mail-server sorted out whas what Bill
Haiden was doing with AtheOS. I also bought a plane that
needed quite a bit of work, and have been busy fixing it
up since. The plane is now finished and sertified and I
will now finish the practical education for the pilot
license as soon as possible (on my own plane). Right now
I don't even have a PC to do any AtheOS development on
as my main PC broke down a few months ago and I won't
get it fixed or buy a new until the expenses on my plane
and license fall below the pain limit : ) When I'm done
with the license I will probably get the PC going again
and start working on AtheOS. But until then nothing
will happen, so don't hold your breath : ). Since my
development PC is broken, even updating the site is a lot
of hassel, but I have made a page with some pictures of
my plane and I will try to keep it a bit updated on what
is going on with it until I get started with AtheOS again.
The pictures can be found here.
They was taken during/after the first (and so far only)
test-flight of the plane Tuesday July 30th.
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| Tue 9 Oct 2001 |
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New version.
Time for a new release of AtheOS. I have not had all that
much time for AtheOS since 0.3.6 but I have got some work
done. The main focus have still been bug fixing and optimization
but I have also added a few new features to the various API's aswell
as a new tool for managing installation of command-line applications
and a tool for adding, listing, and extracting resources to/from
executable images. There is also a new set of classes and functions
that help the applications to locate and load resources embedded in
executable's and DLL's. Various other classes have also been added to
the API and many of the existing classes has been extended. The TCP/IP
stack have got an overhaul and are now performing much better than in
previous versions. Espesially on high-latency links.
Take a look at the changes
list for a more detailed list of changes since V0.3.6.
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| Thu 6 Sep 2001 |
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Some info on the server tweeking front. Like mentioned
in the previous update I was experimenting with various
lightwheight web servers to offload Apache. I didn't
find any that did all I wanted and was lightweight enough
so eventually I whent back to using Apache for everything.
Yesterday however I gave it another go and I believe
I now have a setup that performs reasonably well. Instead of
using separate servers for dynamic and static content
I installed Squid as
a caching frontend server. This greatly offload
Apache by caching the dynamically generated content in
memory and on disk. This increased the server throughput
and maximum allowable number of connections quite a bit. I might
still need to tweak the setup a bit but various stress
tests from another 100Mb/s network gave promicing results
with the current setup.
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| Wed 15 Aug 2001 |
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Having problems accessing www.atheos.cx? Just wanted to
note that I have been doing a lot of experimenting with
the server the last couple of days and that I might still
will have to restart the HTTP server and even reboot the
machine a few times. Since the server is now on a 100Mb/s
link I have tried to get a bit more optimal setup. I have
experimented a lot with different lightwheight HTTP servers
that handle static content like images and downloads while
using Apache for all the CGI generated content. The reason
is that Apache use to much memory when serving many connections.
Unfortunately I have not been happy with any of the servers
I have tested so now I'm back to using Apache for everything.
In addition I have replaced the old 10Mb/s NIC with a 100Mb/s NIC and done various performanse tests with various settups (different HTTP servers, with one CPU disabled, different number of connections, etc etc) and this have required several reboots and otherwhise interrupted service. I have also found a few bugs in the TCP/IP stack. Most of them have been fixed and the rest I'm looking at now. I will probably have to reboot the server at least once more to update the kernel. The server will also disappear for a while next week some time since I have to change the IP address again. The current address is only temporary so I will have to move it to a permanent address within a few days. That means that the server again will be inaccessible until the new IP address have been distributed to all the name servers around the globe. I will post a new note when I know exactly when the address is going to be changed.
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| Mon 13 Aug 2001 |
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New version.
I have mostly been consentrating on fixing bugs since the
release of V0.3.5 and have got rid of quite a few
anoying bugs and memory leaks. Several bugs have been fixed
in the kernel, ABrowse, ATerm, the GUI toolkit,
and the native filesystem.
Take a look at the changes list for a more detailed list of changes since V0.3.5.
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| Thu 9 Aug 2001 |
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New server connection. The server is now moved from it's
old 2Mb/s to a 100Mb/s connection. There is still a 10Mb/s
NIC in the server though so the actual bandwidth is 10Mb/s
This should hopefully make the site a bit more accessible.
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| Wed 8 Aug 2001 |
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The server will hopefully be moved to a new 100Mb/s link
tomorrow around noon Norwegian time (GMT+2). This means
that the server will get a new IP address so it will be
inaccessible from the moment it is moved and until the
new IP address has been picked up by all the DNS servers
around the world.
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| Mon 30 Jul 2001 |
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Added more RAM to the server and increased the number of
allowed simultanously connections to the HTTP server. This
might make it a little bit more accessible to the hord
of slashdot readers trying to beat it up :) The real
problem is lack of bandwidth though so no miracles are
to be expected.
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| Sun 29 Jul 2001 |
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New version.
There has been a long time since the last release of AtheOS
but finally V0.3.5 is ready for release. There is
several reasons for the long delay like the fact that I have
been rather busy at work lately and that we have had a great
summer here in Oslo so AtheOS have not always been at the
top of my priority list. Also quite a lot of work have gone
into this release and quite a lot of new features and
improvements have been made.
Many of the changes are additions and modifications to the various API's and toolkits but also a few user-visible aspects are improved in this release. Many bugs are fixed in the text editor and list-view widgets. The scrollbar have got a totally new look and a few new features like "paging" (jump one page when clicking beside the knob) and small arrow buttons that can be used to move the know. Some crash-bugs have been fixed and the general robustness of the application server has been improved. Also several kernel crash-bugs have been fixed so the general stability of AtheOS have improved quite a bit. The uptime on my heavily stressed developer machine is 34 days when I write this (the time since the last HW upgrade). This version also have two new keymaps (German and Sweedish) and support for a wide range of nVidia graphics adaptors. The main focus for V0.3.5 however has been on the KHTML based web browser. I have ported the HTML parser/renderer used in the Konqueror web browser (KHTML) to AtheOS. KHTML is a very capabel HTML parser and renderer that support both CSS and javascript and so does the AtheOS web browser. Finally a high-quality web browser for AtheOS! The browser is part of the 0.3.5 base install and the 0.3.4->0.3.5 upgrade archive. Take a look at the changes list for a more detailed list of changes since V0.3.4.
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| Sat 28 Jul 2001 |
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New face for atheos.cx! Thanks to Eugenia Loli-Queru
and her nice design and Hisham Muhammad for his nice
AtheOS logo the site have got a new and much better
look. Eugenia actually made the new design several
months ago but I have not had time to rewrite the PHP
code until now. Also the logo has been around for a
long time. Muhammad posted a link to
this
site containing the logo to the AtheOS mailing list a
long time ago but I never got around to do anything about
it until now. Thanks to both for their contributions.
Hope you like the new look aswell!
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| Mon 23 Apr 2001 |
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New version. This is mostly a bug-fix release. There
was a few problems introduced in V0.3.3 that have been
fixed by now. In addition a few old bugs has been
fixed. I have spendt a lot of time revising the AFS
filesystem driver since V0.3.3. Much of the journaling
code has been redesigned to allow backing out of partially
finished transactions if an error occure. The new journaling
code is also better optimized. The rest of the filesystem
has also been overhauled and should now handle all out-of-memory
situasions gracefully (previous version's could not handle
this and whould keep retrying failed allocations until they
succeded, potentially locking up forever). Most of this changes
is not included in this release though. Since so large
portion of the FS has been modified I want to test it
a bit longer myself to make sure no critical bugs has been
introduced. I did however back-port the most important
bugfixes to the old FS and included that instead.
The problems with lockups when changing the screen-mode or
window-decorator in 0.3.3 (and possibly other versions)
have been fixed. A lockup bug has been fixed in the S3 Virge
gfx driver and it is now (again) included on the boot-floppis.
The stime() system-call has been implemented to allow "date"
to set the system clock.
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| Fri 13 Apr 2001 |
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Sorry about the 12 hour! downtime period.
The boot disk died yesterday and I had
to reformat the "tmp" disk and reinstall everything
there. When I was almost done with the install that
disk decided to comitt suicide aswell :( Since I didn't
have any more disk readily available I had to drive back
home and clean up and steal a disk from my home-PC
which is what the server is running on now. Thank you
for your patience.
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| Sun 8 Apr 2001 |
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New version. Quite a lot have happened since the 0.3.2
release. AtheOS now have a high-level object-oriented
filesystem API to go along with the OO GUI API. I
have implemented node-watching which is a system that
allow application's to monitor FS activity like
file-creation, file-modification, file-renaming/moving,
attribute-changes, etc etc without polling on the file
or directory it want to monitor.
The desktop manager is updated to take advantage of node-watching to keep it's directory views current. The "controlling-tty" managment in the kernel have got an overhaul, and a few race-condition was fixed. A process can now open it's own controlling-tty through "/dev/tty" (which makes things like scp work). GCC and the STL library has been updated to make STL-allocators and C++ exceptions thread-safe. A new higly-efficient way of handling thread-local data has been implemented and is now used (among other things) to provide a thread-safe "errno" variable. Some of the GUI classes have been updated with new functionality and bug-fixes (most notably the ListView, and the Font classes). I have also ported/compiled a few new software packages for AtheOS. OpenSSH, zsh, BitchX and epic are now available for download as precompiled packages. More documentation. The documentation is still poor, but I'm working on getting the various API's documented. Take a look at the changes list to learn what's new since V0.3.2.
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| Wed 28 Mar 2001 |
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Then the new server machine is up and running. This site
is now hosted on a Dual Celeron 466 with 256MB RAM running
AtheOS.
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| Tue 27 Mar 2001 |
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Server upgrade coming. I will soon replace the old K6-200
running atheos.cx with a Dual Celeron 466. Hopefully I will
be able to make the swap tomorrow but it might have to be
delayed until thursday. The old server is getting a bit
under-powered this days beside "Dual Celeron" looks much
better than "AMD K6" on the server info page :) There will
be a (hopefully short) down-time periode during the upgrade.
I have got a good portion new feature into AtheOS since the last release so a new version should be ready in not to long. The next version will include things like a highlevel FS API (C++), node-watching (API for monitoring filesystem changes without polling) and an upgraded desktop manager that takes advantage of some of the new features. Over the next couple releases I hope to get the desktop manager flexible enough to make installing of new desktop applications (apps started from the desktop-manager rather than the terminal) an easy task. When this is done I will try to get an AtheOS-software section up and running at www.atheos.cx where people can host AtheOS software and maybe a "screen-shot" section where you can submitt nice AtheOS screen-shots.
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| Thu 22 Feb 2001 |
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New version. Not a major upgrade, but this version has
been tested and found to boot under VMWare. Thanks to
Keith Adams from VMWare for his research on why previous
versions of AtheOS didn't boot under VMWare. I have also
fixed some bugs in ATerm and added some features in the
kernel that prevented the BitchX IRC client to work under
AtheOS. I will build a BitchX package and make it available
for download soon. I have also started to document the
device driver API and non-POSIX system calls. There is
not much yet, but now that I have got Doxygen set up for
the kernel I hopefully find motivation to actually write
some documentation :) Take a look at the
changes
list to learn what's new since V0.3.1.
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| Mon 5 Feb 2001 |
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New version. I have been very busy the last few weeks but I have got
some work done on AtheOS anyway. This release fixes a few bugs from
V0.3.0 and there is a few new features in the GUI API. It also comes
with a partition editor so you can repartition the disk to create
the AFS partition from within AtheOS. Take a look at the
changes
list to learn what's new since V0.3.0.
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| Wed 6 Dec 2000 |
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AtheOS is now available on CD-ROM. Every now and then I receive
requests for AtheOS on CD. After a posting to the AtheOS
mailing-list a lot of people have volunteered to burn and
ship AtheOS CD-ROM's. The list can be found here.
If you have a CD burner and can/want to ship CD's in a area
not already covered please let me know
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| Wed 22 Nov 2000 |
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New Version! This is the first version of AtheOS to use the
GRUB bootloader instead of the old DOS-based bootloader.
This version can (and must) be installed directly to a native
partition using a set of boot floppies. The current version
require quite a bit of "manual" work in a terminal to
format the FS and mount the required partition in order to
do the installation but I am working on a installer that when
finished will automate most of this. I am also working on
support for mounting (and booting from) "extended" partition
but it did not make it for this release so AtheOS can currently
only mount primary partitions. Finaly an "independent" AtheOS :)
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| Wed 22 Nov 2000 |
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The server will be down for a little while (pobably about an hour) later today
(aprox. 17:00 GMT) for an OS and HW upgrade
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| Tue 31 Oct 2000 |
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New boot-loader on it's way. I have now ported the GRUB
bootloader to AtheOS and modified the kernel to be compliant
with the MultiBoot standard. I have also written a read-only
micro version of the native AtheOS filesystem for GRUB.
This means that the boot-loader can find the kernel and
the device and filesystem drivers required to mount the root
FS and boot directly off the filesytem without the need
for running any ugly tools that rebuilds a kernel-blocklists
or anything like that after installing new kernels and such. It also means that
the kernel don't need *any* device drivers and filesystems
builtin. The boot-loader will load and pass the required
device-driver images to the kernel during bootup.
I have installed the bootloader on one of my machines and it now boot nicely off the native partition (instead of going through DOS like earlier). There is still quite a few loose ends though so I won't be able to make a new release for a while yet, but it is closing in now. The main headache now will be to get a simple installation procedure in place.
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| Thu 19 Oct 2000 |
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New version! This is a major upgrade from the
0.2.0 version. There is several new classes in the GUI toolkit
and a lot of extensions to the old classes. The kernel is
much more stable. A lot of deadlock bugs was introdused when
I implemented dynamic cache size in the 0.1.3 version. Most
of the bugs was fixed by V0.2.0 but it still had
problems with fragmentations of the kernel-heap making the
kernel run out of memory after a while. This problems have been
sorted out in the 0.2.1 kernel and it now seems to be stable
(I have had two machines running under heavy stress for more
than 10 days now without any problems).
The most important change however is that the default fonts
are now fully configurable and that the base installation
now contain all the needed fonts. The fonts included are
from the now GPL'ed Open Office. The monospaced font looks
ok but it is missing the box-rendering glyphs. It also have
a bit to many features to be clear in small sizes. If you
happen to own a good looking commersial monospaced font
(like Lucida Console) I recommend using that instead.
To get a more detailed description of what's new take
a look at the changes log at the download page.
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| Fri 6 Oct 2000 |
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New network driver. I have ported the Realtek RTL8129/8139
Linux NIC driver (Written by Donald Becker) to AtheOS. A beta of
the driver can be found on the 0.2.0 download page.
I did some minor changes to the kernel that the driver depends
on so the rtl8139-drv.tgz is containing both the driver and
a new kernel. To install both just unpack the archive from
the root directory.
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| Sun 24 Sep 2000 |
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Redesigned the download page and added a "patch" section
where I will upload patches for the various ports I have made.
The sources are also available through anonymous CVS.
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| Thu 14 Sep 2000 |
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New version! I have built a new AtheOS distribution and uploaded
to this server. The new version have some GUI-API changes and
a more "flikker" free GUI plus a few other changes. Read the
changes.txt
file for more details. Got to the
download page to get the rest.
Note that this time I built an "upgrade" package that can upgrade
from 0.1.4 to 0.2.0 without resetting the old configuration. Just
unpack the upgrade archive somewhere and run the upgrade.sh shell
script inside.
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| Wed 30 Aug 2000 |
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New kernel-upgrade. The kernel from the 0.1.4a tar-ball had
a bug that caused readdir() to fail every now and then.
This is fixed in the 0.1.4b version.
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| Tue 29 Aug 2000 |
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The server was down for several hours due to a power-outage :(
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| Sun 27 Aug 2000 |
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New version. I have only been working on the kernel since
V0.1.4 so instead of building a full version I uploaded a
tarball holding only the kernel and a new libc.so. The new
kernel have two new syscalls (sync() and chroot()) and it
provide device-drivers with support for ISA DMA. The most
important change however is in the block-cache. The 0.1.4
kernel was the first to have dynamic cache size but it
was not very efficient. It wasted about 50% of the RAM
in fragmentation and controll-data. It also caused the
kernel heap to fragment over time and eventualy caused
the kernel to run out of usable RAM. The new kernel have
a memory overhead of 1-2% and does not fragment the heap.
The new kernel also have a lot of deadlock condition in
the cache/VM fixed. The new kernel is in the
"kernel-upgrade-0.1.4a.tgz" archive on the download
page. It contains a few binaries and a README file
telling where to put them. Thanks to Joel Smith for the ISA DMA kernel patch.
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| Wed 23 Aug 2000 |
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The new kernel seems to run stable so I have now re-enabled
anonymous CVS access.
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| Tue 22 Aug 2000 |
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Finally I got the new kernel finished. I have done a major
rewrite of the block-cache (again) to make it more robust and
to avoid the problems the 0.1.4 kernel had with fragmenting
the kernel-heap and making the kernel die due to lack of
memory. I have fixed a lot of known possible deadlock situations
and a few unknown. I am now testing the new kernel and will
propably make a kernel-update available soon. If it seems to
run stable I will try to re-enable anonymous CVS access and see
if the server can handle it this time :)
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| Sat 19 Aug 2000 |
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Joel Smith released a SoundBlaster Pro driver for AtheOS and
contributed a kernel-patch giving support for ISA-DMA. He also
released an AtheOS port of the mpg123, so for the first time it
is now possible to play MP3's under AtheOS.
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| Thu 20 Jul 2000 |
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Due to lack of HD space and the enormous amount of temporary files
generated by CVS plus some problems with the latest kernel fragmenting
kernel-memory and locking up when the FS journal grows to big
I had to temporarily disable anonymous CVS access. The CVS
repository is still accessible through the CVSWeb interface.
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| Sun 16 Jul 2000 |
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Ported and uploaded a precompiled version of TCPD 0.0.2 to the server.
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| Wed 12 Jul 2000 |
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Built version 1.10.8 of CVS and uploaded to the server.
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| Sun 9 Jul 2000 |
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I set up a webcam at home pointing at my Parrot. The
camera is online whenever my dial-up link is online
and the parrot is within sight of the camera. Live ParrotCam
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| Sun 2 Jul 2000 |
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A SCSI cable loosened and the server was down for
about 10 hours :(
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| Tue 27 Jun 2000 |
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The server was moved to a new office and due to that was down
for a short periode of time around 12:00 GMT.
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| Mon 26 Jun 2000 |
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Redisigned the download page. The new page have separate lists
for each version to make it simler to figure out what to download.
It also have an "small" and a "full" version so you can hide
some of the info.
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| Sun 25 Jun 2000 |
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Jesper Hansen rebuilt Python for AtheOS 0.1.4. Due to some changes
in GLIBC between 0.1.3 and 0.1.4 the old Python package was broken.
If upgrading from 0.1.3 to 0.1.4 and you are using Python you
must also upgrade to this
version,
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| Sun 25 Jun 2000 |
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Jesper Hansen registered a "Theam AtheOS" at distributed.net. He also
ported the public part of the client so if distributed.net says GO we
will soon have a client for AtheOS. So if you are into RC5 key crunching
please join up :)
The stat page is at http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/tmsummary.php3?team=85018314
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| Thu 22 Jun 2000 |
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Upgraded QMail and Bind so now the www.atheos.cx server
should be fully operational again.
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| Thu 22 Jun 2000 |
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Upgraded the needed libraries and tools to get the uptime
counter back online. Unfortunatly the QMail server also
need to be recompiled and I don't have the sources here
at work so I will not be able to receive mail until later
today.
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| Wed 21 Jun 2000 |
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Upgraded the kernel on this server to the new 0.1.4.
Not all of the libraries and tools is upgraded yet so
the uptime counter is broken.
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| Wed 21 Jun 2000 |
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AtheOS was anonced at freshmeat and the server was under quite
heavy load for a few hours.
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| Tue 20 Jun 2000 |
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I built a new release of AtheOS and uploaded to the server. The new version
have a totaly redesigned block-cache to improve disk performance and to make
it possible to mount filesystem with different block-sizes simultanously.
The new cache have a smarter read-ahead scheeme that perform much better with the
access patterns generated by the B+tree traversing in the native filesystem.
The cache is also much better intergrated with the memory managment in the
kernel so it can use all free memory as disk cache instead of a fixed amount
as in the previous versions.
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| Wed 24 May 2000 |
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BeGroovy ran a story about AtheOS based on information from Michael Wulff Nielse.
Unfortunatly the info he came up with was *very* inaccurate and the essence of the
storry was that AtheOS was written by 3 BeOS developers during the past 7 months.
Well the only date actually mentioned was that Michael W. had been working on
AtheOS for 7 months (Even though the first release of AtheOS was put on the server
less than 2 months before and he had not contributed anything to the core OS, he
did wrote a CPU meter though) but the story was picked up by BeNews and later a lot
of other sites and it mutated slightly on the way. The fact is that I have never run
BeOS myself other than looking over the shoulder of one of my friends who run it as
his main OS.
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| Tue 23 May 2000 |
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The AtheOS server was slashdottet. This is the worst mass atack I have ever seen.
The server barerly touched the floor for five days :) After a few hours the server
received way more traffic than it was able to handle and had to start rejecting
connections. The problem was that the kernel printed a warning message each time
a connection was rejected and soon it was sending more data over the 115200 baud
debug link than over the network :( When I noticed the problem I removed the messages
and recompiled the kernel. From that point the limit was the external link. The
server is hooked to the net through a 2Mb link that was saturated for about a week.
Another problem was that the amount of RAM in the server limited the "safe"
number of simultanous connections to 70 so it got very hard to get a connections
to the server. What was realy nice though was that the server survived
the slashdotting without any crashes, it was just heavily overloaded.
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