RISC OS 5.24 stable is now available
Posted by Steve Revill Mon, 23 Apr 2018 12:57:00 GMT
After a long run up RISC OS Open Limited (ROOL) are pleased to announce the much anticipated latest stable RISC OS release for many of the computers your favourite OS currently runs on.
CC-BY Richard Humphrey
What’s stable, and how is it different to what I’m running now?
The stable release criteria are used to evaluate which ports are awarded a 5.24 badge, and which need some more work to finish them off. Using the convention of even numbers for stable editions and odd numbers for development editions, work has already commenced on RISC OS 5.25, we hope to add more stable ports for when RISC OS 5.26 comes along.
For the Tungsten platform (used in the IYONIX pc from Castle Technology) it incorporates a massive 633 changes, 707 changes for the OMAP3 platform (used in the ARMini from RComp), 708 changes for the OMAP4 platform (used in the PandaRO from CJE Micros and ARMiniX from RComp), and 633 changes for the IOMD platform used in the Acorn Risc PC/A7000/A7000+.
For the first time the stable release includes the hugely popular Raspberry Pi series (costing less than £30), and also the Titanium port (used in the Rapido-Ti from CJE Micros and TiMachine from RComp).
Show your support
Putting together this latest release takes considerable time and effort, not just on the coding, but the testing, co-ordination, documentation and other administration that nobody ever sees. Downloads also use the bandwidth allocation for the server that this website runs on.
Please consider making a donation to show your appreciation:
Donations will be spread at random between the currently open bounties. As an illustration, three bounties were completed and included in this release, with some smaller improvements from the two which are currently running also added as well.
Thanks also to the selected testers who tried out some internal versions of 5.24, and to you for trying out the nightly beta builds.
Before you start
RISC OS is more than just a ROM image! The disc based components have also seen some 654 changes. Provided you already have RISC OS 5.22 installed, then a simple installer script is provided to update the operating system !Boot application in situ (backing up any changes it makes).
The rest of the supplied applications can simply be copied out of the ZIP archive to wherever you prefer to keep them on your drive.
If you’re starting from RISC OS 5.21 or earlier then you must perform the more longwinded rather than using the in situ short cut.
Is there any documentation I can read?
Indeed there is! RISC OS 5.24 is also accompanied by a new version of the User Guide book, which has been updated for the first time since 1997 with some help from the community. Watch out for a news article describing where you can buy your copy.
What happened about zero page protection?
In the days following the release of RISC OS 5.22 way back in July 2015 we gave notice to buggy applications that they would soon no longer be able to access the ARM vectors, kernel workspace, or any memory in what is known as ‘zero page’ – the little bit of memory from addresses 0 to 4095. This is an important step to allow us to make much more radical changes to the kernel workspace required to move RISC OS towards running on multiple cores in modern ARM processors, and to greatly improve system stability by removing a common class of programming mistake when applications use an address of zero by mistake.
Most software has bugs in it, even the operating system itself wasn’t immune and around 70 such bugs have been fixed during the last 34 months of testing, plus some others found by brave developers trying it out as far back as 2009 when the initiative began.
We’ve been delighted by the response from developers who have, on the whole, taken the opportunity to fix lots of longstanding problems that had been hiding for years. There’s a list of applications that have been reported and fixed, many of which have been issued free of charge, but a few require a paid upgrade to gain that and extra new features.
To help with compatibility a largely empty ‘page’ of read-only memory has been positioned where the old ‘zero page’ used to be, so accidental reads will continue to be hidden until any of the few remaining buggy applications are fixed.
Notes from the wise about installing
Notes for the Raspberry Pi
We’ve provided a complete SD card image that can be written directly to an SD card using tools such as Win32DiskImager (Windows), CloneDisc (RISC OS), or the dd command (Unix). This is the simplest way to start.
If you already have the earlier release candidate RC15 you can update your disc image first (see above), then replace the 4 files BOOTCODE.BIN START.ELF FIXUP.DAT and RISCOS.IMG in the special !Boot.Loader directory.
Notes for the IYONIX pc
The new ROM image should be able to upgrade all versions of RISC OS from version 5.07 or later and is provided with a flash programming tool (which also takes a backup of the previous version just incase you wish to go back).
As the ROM now includes extra modules, some of the module location numbers have changed. Because the *UNPLUG settings only remember the module location numbers you may need to review any unplugged modules after the upgrade to ensure the desired ones are unplugged, and that crucial modules are not left unplugged by mistake.
A softloading version allows testing prior to reflashing the onboard memory chip.
Notes for users of Beagleboard, Pandaboard and derivatives
Simply replace the file called “riscos” on the SD memory card, or rerun !SDCreate which is included in the download.
As the ROM now includes extra modules, some of the module location numbers have changed. Because the *UNPLUG settings only remember the module location numbers you may need to review any unplugged modules after the upgrade to ensure the desired ones are unplugged, and that crucial modules are not left unplugged by mistake.
Notes for the Elesar Titanium
The new ROM image can be programmed into the boot flash memory chip. A utility program, FlashQSPI, is provided to do this and takes about 30 seconds to go through the cycle and verify.
Notes for the Risc PC, A7000, A7000+
A new set of RISC OS 5.24 ROM and accompanying install CD-ROM are available from the ROOL store. The CD-ROM includes an installation video and the disc based software. The Kinetic processor upgrade card originally sold by Castle Technology is also supported, if yours has flash memory on it then use the flash programmer download instead, otherwise you’ll need a set of ROMs as well.
I’m loving this new version of RISC OS on my Raspberry Pi3. Many thanks to everyone who was involved in making this the best version yet.
5.24 now on my Titanium – it’s working great – the list of changes is a credit to everyone involved at ROOL, keep it up! I really ought to hurry up and finish 32 bitting RiscTV so my Risc PC can be updated too…
Not to mention it’s about 15% faster than compared to v5.22.
Measured on a RPI2 with Firebench from Micheal Kubel. Which is the only benchmark that consistently runs on all OS version (so far).
Any chance we’ll see RISC OS back in NOOBS, now that it’s officially ‘stable’? We can then have it on PINN too – https://github.com/procount/pinn/issues/80
Getting it into NOOBS would be great; hopefully we’d get some new users. With that said, I’d suggest fixing this bug first, for a better experience (this is a Pi image issue, not a problem with 5.24 itself).