Renraku has seen a renewed surge of energy in the past few weeks, and has made big strides. Here's what's going on.

Where we are

Renraku now runs in hosted mode on top of MS.NET/Mono. This enables a much, much quicker development/debugging cycle, and allows us to start working on the GUI while the low level details are still being worked out. There's still work to be done here, but it's a good start. We've also made the leap to Rake from NAnt; dealing with the bulky, inflexible build files just got to be too much. A few hours of hacking and Rake now fits our purposes perfectly.

After hosted mode came up, we made a push to get video/mouse services built on top of SDL, enabling us to start developing the GUI. You can see an initial GUI coming up and displaying our logo here:

In addition, Capsules (check out this blog post if you don't know what this is: Renraku OS: Networking, Hosted Mode, Moving Forward) are in progress and are taking shape; the implementation is still rapidly changing, but we seem to have a solid idea of what they're supposed to look like and how they interact with each other.

Where we're going

The project is now moving in parallel on two efforts: Userspace (GUI, applications, storage), and native (kernel, compiler, drivers). This will all converge over the next 6 months.

We're aiming to make two releases between now and July 4th, which will serve to get the code in the hands of developers leading up to v1.0. We now have a solid roadmap for Renraku v1.0, which we aim to release on July 4th, the one-year aniversary of the project. The roadmap is as follows:

Goal

The project goal is that v1.0 should go out on July 4, 2010. This marks the first anniversary of the project and will be the first major release.

What should it do?

You should be able to start Renraku in hosted or native mode (IA32 native only) and bring up a usable GUI. You should be able to browse files, start applications, edit configuration, and run UI tests. Depending on time constraints, we may or may not have additional applications (and a game?)

What needs to be done?

Compiler:

• Exceptions
• Generics
• Array bounds checking
• Emit proper class data for reflection

Gui:

• Basic toolkit for controls
• Image rendering
• Font rendering
• Vector support?

Graphical shell:

• Window management
• Desktop icons
• Some sort of system tray/menu

Kernel:

• Tracebacks on exceptions
• Garbage collection
• Memory management
• Storage
  • Low level storage service (hard drive access)
  • FAT32 filesystem service
• Networking
  • TCP
  • IP and UDP supporting fragmenting
  • More robust DHCP
  • DNS
  • Routing
  • Transparent object remoting
• Video driver on IA32 (better than VGA)

Services:

• Capsule implementation
• Service documentation

BCL:

• Migrate to Mono BCL
• Implement more of the BCL, if migrating to the Mono BCL isn't possible/practical

Applications:

• GUI console
• File browser
• Basic text editor
• Image viewer
• Some basic GUI game?

Build System:

• Allow portions of the code to be tagged as platform-specific, rather than the large file lists in the Rakefile
• Integrate building a LiveCD with a complete Renraku system.
• Build Renraku installer (XXX: May get pushed back to v2)

How you can get involved

At this point, we need a few things: Application developers, service developers, kernel developers, and compiler developers. Want to write the first Doom port to run on a managed OS, a Twitter client, a completely new web browser, or a sane networking stack? Here's your chance.

No matter how you want to help out, or if you just want to ask some questions, join us at #renraku on Freenode IRC.

Points of contact:

• Daeken (Cody Brocious, ) -- Kernel lead; Kernel, services.
• ircubic (Daniel Bruce, ) -- Userspace lead; GUI, applications, storage. Documentation lead. Build system.
• nrr (Nathaniel Reindl, ) -- BCL lead. Memory management lead.
• dublindan (Daniel Kersten, ) -- Capsule lead.

Happy Hacking,
- Cody Brocious (Daeken)