Our yearly summer conference will be held from Saturday July 18 to Saturday July 25 in the Netherlands. We will be sailing again on the Frisian vessel the Stêd Sleat while discussing and demoing the Syllable systems. This year we are offering several arrangements, so you can choose how many days you want to attend. There are discounts for longer stays and for kids, so you can make this into a nice vacation for your family. Contact Bas for arrangements.

The news sections of the websites have been extended with RSS feeds. If you prefer to follow Syllable news through an RSS reader application, you can now do so. Each selection of the news on the different sites has a corresponding feed. Look for the RSS icons. Please don't let your reader fetch the feeds too often. We don't publish news several times per day, so it's no use to check more often than a few times each day. Each news article now also has its own page, so the feeds can point to them. Good reading!

Kristian has implemented asynchronous input/output. This has been tested with QEmu, which shows increased performance both due to this and the also new implementation of memory-mapped files. A development build with async I/O is already available. Other recent enhancements it includes are automatic log-in without password and installation by keyboard only, without needing a mouse.

Async I/O is implemented as a native POSIX interface. The available functions are aio_read() and aio_write(). In addition, the asynchronous case for msync() in memory-mapped files is now supported. In Syllable 0.6.6, async I/O is simulated in the GNU C library and executed synchronously. This was enough to make QEmu work, but now async I/O is actually implemented through a syscall kernel interface.

Originally, Syllable relied solely on pervasive multithreading for its exceptional responsiveness. A few years ago, a new scheduler was introduced that is more suitable to desktop use than the original round-robin scheduler. Async I/O will further enhance responsiveness in ported applications that use it.

After Syllable Desktop 0.6.6 already brought a number of improvements to standards support, Kristian has now implemented the POSIX interface to memory-mapped files. Ever more software requires this functionality. Both the interfaces for memory-backed files and anonymous memory maps are supported. Syllable has always used memory-mapped files for its in-kernel ELF loader, so the POSIX interface is implemented on top of this. A development build going towards Syllable 0.6.7 is already available, in which several components should make use of mmap.

The mmap(), munmap(), mprotect() and msync() functions are implemented. In the process, Kristian fixed some bugs in the underlying memory management implementation in the kernel. One of the next planned implementations of standard interfaces is async I/O, among other things for completing the mmap support. Further, it was determined that the time is nearing that the syscall interface needs to change from int 0x80 to SYSENTER/SYSCALL. mmap() is the kernel's first syscall with six arguments, requiring extensions to the syscall table and strace(). The newer SYSENTER interface is needed to fully support this and 64-bits arguments, also for a future 64-bits port of Syllable.

There is a tendency in much open source software in recent years to require advanced features of the host platform, that are only available on the major systems; sometimes only on Linux. This is problematic for alternative operating systems and undermines the portability of open source and the diversity and choice of platforms. Through the addition of the mmap interface, we hope to gain access to such software as GCC beyond the 4.1 versions, Gnash, Cherokee and maybe PostgreSQL. Software that will perform better includes FreeType, SDL and DOSBox.

There's a release candidate for Syllable Desktop 0.6.6 in our development builds now. If you want to influence the final version, this is your last chance to test it.

Public versions have been released of the current alpha version of REBOL 3 for Linux and Mac OS X. Like the private version of a year ago, the Linux version runs on Syllable Server. These versions are currently comparable to REBOL/Core 2, without the graphical system, and can be downloaded through here: www.rebol.net/r3blogs/0171.html.

If you have an Internet connection, the new Graphical User Interface of REBOL 3 and a set of demo programs can be loaded from the R3 command shell by typing:

   demo

Please keep in mind that this does not reflect the eventual GUI yet. You can start writing your own GUI programs for example like this:

   load-gui

   view [button "Test" do [print "OK"]]

Read more in the REBOL 3 GUI documentation: www.rebol.net/wiki/R3_GUI.