January 2025

[elydre]

January 2025

Here's the first monthly news for profanOS. At the start of each month, you'll find a list of new releases, ports and features that have been implemented! January has been a busy month for profan with the porting of python 3.11 and GNU make, cool user space features and an increasingly complete libc.

About the python port

I was surprised to see that once well configured python was not so complex to cross compile for non linux based systems. I tried cross compiling after porting perl very easily last month. The python executable (without -g and non-strip) is around 5 MB which is not so heavy for such a complete programming language. The bulky python installation is mainly due to the large number of standard modules.

The port works incredibly well, the first launch of python is quite slow, since it creates the .pyc of the modules, this step is normally done during the installation but the installer was not very cooperative for a cross compilation :)

Python is one of my favorite high-level languages and seeing it in profan makes me happy. I don't think I'll use it as the default sripting language (at least for now) due to its large size, but it offers a lot of possibilities for mini-games/tools that can run in profanOS without being compiled or modified.

It would be really cool to have additional python modules like pygame or tkinter to make GUIs or small games. Porting pygame is conceivable, since it's a kind of SDL2 interface, and sdl is already ported to profan (thanks to asqel). On the other hand, tkinter is likely to be much more complex, as it's based on tcl/tk, which looks really hard to port.

About the make port

I'm not really a fan of makefiles (profanOS uses python to compile). However, for a few months now I've been wanting to have a make implementation in profan so that I can compile various projects found on GitHub directly into the OS without having to do any cross-compilation.

I chose the GNU implementation because it's very widespread and compatible with a lot of makefiles, and strangely, porting it was easy (enough to revise my prejudices about GNU? - no). Now we can directly compile programs in profanOS like lua, or lcc (there's an incomplete list of programs that can easily be compiled in profan here).

A demo of GNU-make on the lua source code

It's always hard to choose between porting something or doing it myself. For profan, I'm just wondering if the OS is normally usable without it. If that's the case, I'll do a port (downloadable precompiled files during disk construction) otherwise I'll implement it myself. That's probably why I wouldn't use X11 as a window system.

Change log

Command line

• patch of R_386_COPY resolution in deluge.
• added readelf -R to display dynamic relocations in a file.
• added basic coloring for python files in rim.
• implemention of strings -n to display strings in a file.
• deletion of several files with rm.
• implementation of mkdir -p.

Olivine

• set ++ var adds 1 to the var varible.
• option -d to execute file with some debug.
• option -s to stop olivine at the first error.

libc.so (2.6)

• header locale.h (partial function implementation).
• header signal.h (empty functions).
• header wchar.h (with mbsrtowcs, wcrtomb, wcschr, wcscmp, wcscpy, wcscspn, wcsftime, wcslen, wcsnlen, wcsncpy, wcsrchr, wcsrtombs, wmemchr and wmemset implemented).
• header wctype.h (empty functions).
• header sys/select.h (empty select function).
• rework of time.h and clock_gettime function.
• rework of headers stdint.h, limits.h and float.h for compilers that don't integrate definitions such as __INT8_TYPE__ or __FLT_MANT_DIG__.
• function profan_nimpl - in profan.h (see wiki).
• function profan_path_path (see wiki).
• support for %ls in printf (&co) to display wchar_t *.
• implementation of fcntl(F_DUPFD).
• choice of working directory in run_ifexist_full function.
• implementation of standard functions fdopen, realpath, ctermid, execvpe, lstat, mbstowcs, wcstombs and strcoll.

Miscellaneous

• Creation of libpthread.so (functions not implemented) - required for compiling python.
• creation of /dev/urandom calling the same function as /dev/random.
• Lua modules and examples (in /zada/lua) are no longer in the main repo but are downloaded during make addons.

Ports

• porting of python 3.11 and its modules.
• porting GNU make 4.4.

You can test profanOS from your web browser without installing anything right here.

Thank you xx