February 2025

[elydre]

February 2025

Winter is already over, it's time for the second update note! profanOS has long been a kind of sandbox for low-level experimentation, rather than a real operating system. But over the last few months I've spent a lot of time using it in real hardware, and it's become something of a sanctuary from everything I find annoying about modern computing.

Userspace in motion

The layout of /bin in the file system has been modified to have shorter paths without mixing everything together as in most unix operating systems.

• /bin/c/ -> elf commands
• /bin/h/ -> addons and heavy stuff
• /bin/l/ -> links and scripting
• /bin/g/ -> graphics and games
• /bin/x/ -> system (deluge, rosemary)

Files starting with >! are treated as "fastbang" files. These files are similar to unix shebang, and can be used as links to a command with flags. Unlike shebangs, the path of the file containing the fastbang is not passed as an argument to the command.

New ports

The text editor supplied with profanOS is rim, it includes basic syntax highlighting and some keyboard shortcuts, it's really cool for light editing but it doesn't integrate search/replace, autocompletion or advanced functionality. However, it's quite hard to find text editors written in C that are light enough and portable, so lite is the perfect candidate, it's a mix of C and lua, and uses SDL2 for display. There's also a more complete version of lite called lite XL which seems to be heavier and less easy to compile, so we'd rather port the original version. (obviously rim remains maintained)

The growing libc allows new things to be ported easily without modifying their source code, this month, this was the case with libarchive, an archiving and compression library present on many unix systems. It supports a variety of formats and can be coupled with compression libraries such as libz. An implementation of the tar, unzip and zcat commands is also included.

libpng has also been ported to replace libupng (less standard and complete). A port of binutils is currently functional but experimental, it will certainly be present in addons in the coming weeks. Binutils is a collection of tools made by the GNU project, it includes ld, as and a lot of other tools to manipulate object files and executables.

Change log

Command line

• unix options in grep like -NUM.
• creation of the standard uname command.
• commands mem and fetch are merged into sys.
• improve ls -l display.
• mouse.elf restores pixels behind the mouse.
• standardization of command help pages.
• minor patches in the starter shell.

Olivine

• infinite variables, pseudos and functions creation.
• function recursion limit (100 by default).
• internal redesign of eval function.
• cross-platform build improvements.

deluge 5 - dynamic linker

• important memory optimization.
• symbol search optimization.
• improved debug display.
• option -p to load a patch file.
• posix behavior of dlfcn.h functions.

libc.so (2.6)

• header fnmatch.h (functions implemented).
• header utsname.h (functions implemented).
• header grp.h and pwd.h (implemented for root).
• support for directory opening with open.
• patch of append mode opening in fopen.
• implementation of time.h functions: clock, asctime, ctime, gmtime_r and localtime_r.
• implementation of mbrtowc, mbtowc, iswprint, pathconf, fsetpos, fgetpos, ftruncate, truncate and fchdir.

Miscellaneous

• support for \b and underline in panda!
• fastbang files in run_ifexist function.
• change from fu_get_dir to fu_dir_get in filesystem.h.
• improved stability of tools/addons.py - thanks @Sarah.
• utility tools/dump2bin.py to create the source file from a hexdump -C.
• the mandelbrot.lua file has been moved to the addons (downloaded with lua).

Ports

• improvements in SDL2 port - thanks @asqel.
• porting lite text editor.
• porting libarchive 3.7.7 and its commands.
• porting libpng 1.6.47 (replaces upng).

Version 1.3 of the kernel is currently under development, and will include better module support, enabling drivers and extensions to be loaded more cleanly, as well as fixes to kernel mode entry, which should be more stable and secure. There are also plans to implement unix-style signals and a basic threading system.

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

Thank you xx