Today we celebrate the third birthday of SerenityOS, counting from the first commit in the
git repository, on October 10, 2018.
What follows is a list of interesting events from the past year, mixed with random development
screenshots and also reflections from other developers in the SerenityOS community.
Introduction to SerenityOS
SerenityOS is a from-scratch desktop operating system that combines a Unix-like core
with the look&feel of 1990s productivity software. It's written in modern C++ and
goes all the way from kernel to web browser. The project aims to build everything in-house
instead of relying on third-party libraries.
I started building this system after
finishing a 3-month rehabilitation program for drug addiction
in 2018. I found myself with a lot of time and nothing to spend it on. So I began
building something I'd always wanted to build: my very own dream OS.
Parts of my development work is presented in screencast format on
my YouTube channel.
I also post monthly update videos showcasing new features there.
2020-12-06: Working on Reddit support in LibWeb
Building a browser takes time, and there's a lot of unglamorous
work like figuring out why things don't align right. Fortunately it's
also really fun!
2020-12-20: Interview on CppCast
I went on the CppCast podcast with Jason Turner
and Rob Irving to talk about SerenityOS.
It was my first time doing an interview and I was really nervous about it,
but it turned out very okay!
2020-12-20: The 2020 HXP CTF
SerenityOS was once again featured in the HXP CTF.
After being in their 2019 CTF, we spent a whole bunch of time beefing up system security,
and it definitely helped: This time, only 1 team was able to find an exploit,
compared to 6 teams in the previous CTF!
Write-ups & exploits from the event:
2021-01-06: Reading "Hackles" on SerenityOS
I was very happy to get the classic Unix geek webcomic
Hackles working in Browser.
2021-01-10: LiveOverflow videos about SerenityOS
At the start of 2021, hacking YouTuber LiveOverflow published
a series of videos about SerenityOS, looking into exploits against
the system.
All SerenityOS related videos from LiveOverflow:
2021-02-11: vakzz's full chain exploit
William Bowling (vakzz) released
the first ever full chain exploit for SerenityOS, combining a browser bug and
a kernel bug to get remote root access via opening a web page!
Check out vakzz's excellent write-up
for a step-by-step walthrough.
2021-02-13: SerenityOS developer interview: Linus Groh
I wanted to introduce my YouTube audience to more of the SerenityOS
developer community, and Linus became the first guest in my developer
interview series!
It was really nice to shine a light on someone else doing great work on the project.
Developer reflections: Linus Groh
One of my favorite aspects of the past year of SerenityOS development
is the overall progress on the browser! There's still a ton of work to
do, but we're starting to get more and more websites into a recognizable
shape - compared to a year ago, the number of blank pages and crashes
on load is reduced considerably.
It's also one of the most collaborative subsystems: everything from
improving spec compliance in our JavaScript engine and adding some
basic optimizations to implementing countless Web APIs, and continuous
work on CSS and DOM has been a team effort. It's great to see everyone
get comfortable, explore, and eventually become experts in their
favorite topics of browser and JS engine development!
It's been so much fun building all these things together, and I'm
excited to see how far we can get in another year :^)
2021-03-06: Classic game "port": Diablo
DevilutionX is a reverse engineered "port" of the classic game Diablo.
I ported it to SerenityOS and captured the process in a video.
To date, this is my most viewed video and thousands of people discovered
the project through this video.
I also finally beat the game!
2021-04-01: A new direction for the project
On April 1st, I posted a video announcing a new visual and spiritual direction
for the SerenityOS project. Most people got the joke :^)
2021-04-10: Opening a SerenityOS Discord server
We decided to try out Discord after seeing how it was used to great effect
in the Zig language community.
It's been a huge success! While our IRC channel peaked at about 170 users,
we've got well over 4000 members on Discord, and it's helped us reach new
levels of collaboration that were simply not possible with IRC.
It has also spawned an extremely nerdy culture of yak-related memes.
2021-04-18: Interviewed on "Systems with JT"
Programming language wizard JT invited me for an live interview
about SerenityOS and everything around it. It was my first live interview, and I was kinda nervous
but I think it went well!
JT also did a heartwarming video review of SerenityOS back around Christmas.
2021-04-26: More project maintainers
In the interview with JT, one of the things that came up was my own
scalability as a project maintainer. Up until this point I had been doing
all the PR review and merging myself.
After talking about it with JT, I realized that I needed to ask for
some help from a handful of trusted contributors. It was scary to give up
a bit of control, but in retrospect it's one of the best decisions I've made. :^)
At the time of writing, we now have five maintainers in addition to myself (in alphabetical order):
They each bring their own expertise and passion to the project, and they've been doing a great job
at keeping the project moving forward while growing.
2021-05-16: Some GUI face-lifts
Sometimes I like to pick out a part of the GUI that is particularly weak
and spend some time on improving it. Here I was working on the PixelPaint
application, and also the system shutdown dialog.
2021-05-27: Linus gets on GitHub Sponsors
Linus becomes the second person to accept sponsorships
for his SerenityOS work. More people getting sponsored to work on SerenityOS is super cool!
2021-05-28: I quit my job to work on SerenityOS full time!
As of May of 2021, I'm receiving enough in donations to be able to support
myself while working full-time on SerenityOS!
I wrote a blog post about it here and people were very
supportive
around
the
web.
I'm extremely grateful for all the support, and it's super exciting to be
able to focus on this full time! Massive thanks to everyone who has supported
me over the years! If you would like to help me out as well, check out
the links at the bottom of this page.
2021-06-12: Interview on Zig SHOWTIME!
I was a guest on the Zig SHOWTIME variety show
from the Zig language community. The theme was
"tech, taste and soul" and the interview lasted almost 3 hours. Exhausting but fun!
2021-06-30: 64-bit mode activated!
Up until this point, SerenityOS was a 32-bit x86-only system. Then came x86_64,
much thanks to the hard work of Gunnar Beutner
who decided that the port was going to happen, and then didn't stop until it was up and running!
The past year of Serenity development has been super exciting! One of my favorite things
to happen was the bring up of the x86_64 Kernel. Andreas started making baby steps in Feb 2021,
followed by others contributing additional fixes, until around Jun 2021 when
Gunnar Beutner started contributing tons
of patches and with the help of many others got the system booting and running on x86_64.
In my mind this was a significant symbolic step for the project and the community, onboarding
another architecture makes the system a bit more real in my mind.
From the community perspective I found it very inspiring how Gunnar just took the lead and
started fixing issues left and right. The community saw the momentum and started working
on fixes as well, and everyone together got the system running.
I wish Andreas, the SerenityOS project and community, continued success and here's hoping
for another fruitful year of fun and progress. With the
nascent aarch64 port under way by
Nico Weber, and the countless other exciting things
folks are working on, I'm excited to see what the next year has in store! :^)
2021-07-08: SerenityOS Office Hours
After an interesting back & forth "discussion" with my YouTube audience
that started with the question "Am I losing touch with the audience?",
I decided to put some serious effort into connecting with the audience.
After some experimentation, I finally arrived at the SerenityOS Office Hours
format. This is a weekly Q&A livestream that I do every Friday at 4pm Swedish Time.
People are invited to ask any technical or non-technical question about SerenityOS
and we dig into whatever topics come up. It has been well-received and I've really
enjoyed being able to answer questions interactively!
Check out my stream archive
on YouTube. (And come say hi when I'm live some time!)
2021-07-08: A world map of SerenityOS hackers
Linus created a collaborative map
of SerenityOS developers & users around the world.
2021-07-20: TrueType renderer improvements
While I'm a big fan of bitmap fonts personally, I did spend some time working
on our TrueType renderer, fixing up things like vertical alignment and glyph sizes.
I also did some work to support the Microsoft Tahoma
and JetBrains Mono typefaces,
seen in this screenshot!
2021-07-26: Building a "Settings" app
Until this point, all the various settings dialogs were scattered
around the system menu. I decided it was time to collect them in a
simple Settings application instead. I think it turned out quite nice!
2021-07-26: SerenityOS developer interview: Ali Mohammadpur
I did another developer interview video! This time with Ali,
who is behind many of the subsystems in Serenity (including TLS,
line editing, the spreadsheet, and more!)
2021-08-10: Working on multi-core stability
Multi-core support is still immature in SerenityOS, but we have been making some
strides forward in this area. In this screenshot, I'm successfully running Quake II
using 2 CPU's simultaneously.
2021-08-18: ArsTechnica reviews SerenityOS
In mid-August, ArsTechnica ran a feature article on SerenityOS.
This came out of nowhere and was a lot of fun!
2021-08-29: Showing SerenityOS to my nephew
My nephew called me on Skype while I was hacking on something, and I asked
if he wanted a tour of the operating system. He said yes, and I got this sweet
screenshot of him excitedly seeing me beat our Breakout game!
2021-09-12: 500 contributors on GitHub!
It's wild how many people have contributed
to the project at this point!
2021-09-18: Linus Groh interviewed on CppCast
It's been so cool to see Linus's journey with SerenityOS,
from not knowing C++ at all 18 months ago, to being interviewed on a major C++ podcast.
2021-09-19: Reading the HTML spec
It's a pretty cool milestone when your browser engine is strong enough
to download and display the HTML spec itself.
One of the main subprojects in LibJS that was being worked on in 2021 was support for
the stage 3 Temporal proposal,
which aims to replace the old and awkward Date API
with a more modern, unified and fully-featured interface.
As a result of the efforts of many contributors (with some of the most notable ones
being Linus Groh
and Luke Wilde) Serenity's
LibJS contains the most fleshed out Temporal implementation out of all the popular Javascript engines.
2021-10-02: Browser performance work
Lately I've been doing a ton of work on browser performance, trying to
bring it to a point where it can display complex pages in a somewhat reasonable
time.
Here I am using Profiler to examine what appears to be memory allocation
performance in our regular expression engine.
The profiling system has matured quite a bit during the last year. It now
has the ability to capture full-system profiles, and we've got more visualizations
to aid in performance analysis. :^)
Monthly update videos
The tradition of the monthly SerenityOS update video is alive and well,
ever since my first-ever update video in March 2019.
Something new this year is that for the last couple of videos, I've been
joined by Linus in the videos. The sheer amount of things happening month-to-month
was getting hard to cover by myself, and it's great to share the stage with
someone else who cares deeply about the project as well.
Check out the playlist on YouTube
for the full archive!
