The Mattise Operating System News

Only a day after the release of Mattise 3.0 the feedback received has been fantastic. Thanks to all who tried it out. It's inspiring to have people try it out and tell me what's wrong.

3.0.1 contains no new features (other than the meminfo command being fixed). It is merely a bugfix release that fixes numerous FAT driver bugs, a couple of memory manager bugs, and also attempts to improve memory usage and load times.... read more

After over a year of time and effort put into the Mattise project, version 3.0 is now released and ready for download.

Changes include better speed, more portability, and the ability to run software such as NASM or the binutils binaries.

Future plans for the Mattise project include networking support, a graphical user interface, and the usage of the extensible driver interface to provide a standardised interface for drivers to use.

A port of NASM to the Mattise Operating System has been completed, and will be released with the next package.

The next release is planned to be in around 4-5 weeks at the time of writing this news item. This release is a total rewrite of the kernel, with a monolithic design and more compatibility than ever before.

Any questions relating to the NASM port or the timeframe for the next release should go to the mailing list or the forums, NOT the trackers.

We're now on IRC for live discussions relating to the project and its course. If you think it's dead from the SourceForge activity recently, you thought wrong.

Come and join on irc.freenode.net, room #mattise.

Thanks to a recent port of newlib to Mattise, it is now possible to write software to run in Mattise using POSIX-compliant function calls.

This library is currently being used to develop several drivers to run on startup.

Mattise is no longer being compiled with DJGPP, but now with a Cygwin-based GCC cross-compiler targeting ELF format.

Changes to the code include the removal of all leading underscores from assembly code, and the addition of a number of compiler support functions.

One of the biggest reasons is the support for C++ template classes in G++. The new version, 4.2.0 works exceptionally well with the CLinkedList class I have written for use not only in Mattise but also within other, external, programs. The old version could not link the templates.

After numerous revisions of the multitasking code, finally a working version has been implemented. No longer does 'disablemt()' have to be called before every function call that could possibly be pre-empted, and 'Yield()' is no longer necessary. In addition, the bug in the semaphore allocation code that didn't actually return a valid semaphore index has been fixed.

The socket interface has also been implemented without a hitch. As yet only SOCK_DGRAM type sockets are supported (as only UDP has been implemented), but server-side and client-side sockets work properly. They use a structure much like the sockaddr structure that other socket interfaces use.

Most of the serious bugs causing problems when CVS was disabled have since been rectified.

Mattise now supports ne2000 compatible ethernet cards. So far the only protocol implemented is ICMP (pings etc...). Support for TCP/IP is planned for the near future.

PCI support has been added to Mattise. This system will provide a core for future functionality, including a networking layer which is under construction.

A plugin system may be created in the near future to allow other developers to write their own drivers for devices.

Due to the volatile state of the kernel, access to the source code via the 'Code' menu has been removed. CVS will continue to be used as a means of versioning all code generated and once the kernel reaches a stable stage CVS will be re-enabled.

After 4 months of work on Mattise, the first alpha is finally ready for download.

Version 1.0 supports multitasking, 1KB block memory management (soon to be 1B), file i/o, support for execution of binary files, and a simple shell.

The results from this release will also assist in the development of the standard library to be released for developers to write their own applications for Mattise.