The Shippening: TL;DR

If you’ve moved, now is the time to update your address through your account, or contact Crowd Supply support.

Details

The factory has finished production, and we’re now working through the details of getting the units from the factory to your doorstep. This is where Crowd Supply earns their keep, and it hasn’t been an easy lift for them. That being said, it looks like we’ve cleared some of the final hurdles to get the first batch of units to their distribution center, so hopefully backers will be receiving units “soon”, where the value of soon depends on how much congestion we have in the “last-mile” shipping and logistics channels.

Once the inventory arrives at Crowd Supply’s distribution center, shipping to backers will begin shortly after. If a backer needs to update their shipping address, they can do so through their account, or contact Crowd Supply Support..

Backers will receive an email with a tracking number when their order ships. Order status is also always available to view within one’s Crowd Supply account.

With production wrapped up, we’ve been able to turn our focus toward improving the operating system itself.

Xous 0.9.6: TL;DR

The first thing you should do is update your firmware with a “factory reset” script once you receive your device.

Xous: Setting Expectations

Substantial, security API-breaking changes have been introduced since the snapshot that was given to the factory back in October. When I say “API-breaking”, I mean that core routines that deal with encryption keys had bug fixes that will invalidate any existing root keys (you put the keys in there, not the factory, so this is why it’s important to do the update before you key your device).

With units arriving at backer’s doorsteps soon, we will be much more cautious before introducing any new API-breaking changes. However, to set expectations, we are still pre-1.0 and I expect that with greater community review, we will find bugs that are both important to fix and will have no way to fix them other than with an API-breaking change.

While we are pleased that Xous has reached an “MVP” level, it is still just a kernel. If you were to compare it to Linux, it’s like a compact Linux embedded installation with a single Busybox process that has about 1/20th of the commands implemented.

However, Xous is not Linux, nor does it aim to be (after all, Linux already exists, and anyone is welcome to port it to Precursor!). Xous is closer to a BIOS in terms of functionality and role: it is a framework meant to prop up tightly integrated single-point applications, providing a layer of essential system services and abstractions that are primarily accessed via code API calls and not a command line environment.

Because Xous doesn’t really fit into any pre-defined category, I suspect we’ll be hammering on this point quite a bit as developers get their hands on it. The more code we roll into Xous, the bigger the attack surface; it will be a delicate balance between “all the features” and “all the security”.

Release Details

Xous 0.9.6 is one of the few releases we do where you will see substantial cosmetic differences in the UX. Here is what Xous used to look like:

And here is the latest version:

Aside from the obvious change of smaller font options, here’s a list of things that have been introduced since Xous 0.9.5:

• Networking: DNS, UDP, Ping and TCP
  • Basic demo of ping, rudimentary http get/serve
  • EC offload of ARP and DHCP – thanks to samblenny for adding that, along with a solid refactor of the EC code base! The EC now also has the capability to act as a coarse packet filter for the core CPU.
• Connection manager
  • Maintains a list of known SSID/password combos
  • Manages passive SSID scanning and re-connection
  • Enrolling in and saving a network profile is done via shellchat's wlan series of commands
  • Only WPA2 is supported
  • Still a lot of corner cases to work through
• PDDB: Plausibly Deniable DataBase for system config and user data storage.
  • Uniform filesystem for all user-specific Xous data
  • Fully encrypted database
  • Plausibly deniable secret overlays
  • See this blog post for more details
  • Rust API bindings available, but as of now, few command line tools
• EC events – asynchronous callbacks triggered by network and battery events
• CPU load monitor in status bar
• Improved fonts
  • B/W display optimized emoji
  • Chinese-native Hanzi glyphs
  • Japanese-native Kanji glyphs
  • Hangul glyph set
  • Thanks again to samblenny for all the hard work to make a slick new set of glyphs and a smooth new API!
• Japanese locale
• AZERTY and QWERTZ layouts
• Auto word-wrapping in the TextView objects
• Simplified graphical abstractions
  • Modal server: create notifications, checkboxes, progress bars, radio boxes, and text entry boxes with validators using a single API call
  • Simplified menu API
• Modular application programs
  • manifest.json file to specify application integration parameters, such as the localized name and app launcher menu name
  • Build-time command line selection of which apps you want baked into the Xous image
• Many bug fixes and improvements
• Improved libstd support
• Improved Renode and Hosted mode support

The introduction of modular applications is probably of most consequence to new users, because it gives a framework for managing which applications are in your Xous build. It will also allow us to integrate new contributions to the Xous ecosystem without growing the disk image for all users – individual users can choose, a la carte, which applications they want inside their disk image by specifying it in the build command line. Read more about how this works at our wiki!