webOS, also known as webOS TV and open webOS, is a multitasking operating system for smart devices such as televisions and watches, based on Linux.
The new version of WebOS 2.23 comes with various bug fixes implemented, as well as with some support, performance improvements, optimizations and also with some quite interesting changes.
For those who are still unaware of webOS Open Source Edition (or also known as webOS OSE), you should know that the webOS platform was originally developed by Palm in 2008. The webOS system environment is built using OpenEmbedded and the basic packages, as well as a build system and metadata set from the Yocto project.
The key components of webOS are the System and Application Manager (SAM), which is responsible for running applications and services, and the Luna Surface Manager (LSM), which forms the user interface.
Rendering is done through a composite manager using the Wayland protocol. To develop custom applications, it is proposed to use web technologies (CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript) and the Enact framework based on React, but it is also possible to create programs in C and C++ with an interface based on Qt.
Main new features of WebOS Open Source Edition 2.23
In this new version of WebOS 2.23 that is presented, various improvements have been integrated, of which it stands out, for example, that now in the SDK of Telegraf, added the ability to monitor CPU resource consumption, track the list of processes and monitor process memory, as well as a framework for audio post-processing has been added, with the help of which the equalizer functionality is implemented.
Another of the changes that stands out in this new version is that The malicious site identification system has been improved using the Web Risk API, plus now in WebOS 2.23 a local database is used instead of a file to store hashes of malicious sites, which significantly reduces memory consumption.
We can also find in this new version of WebOS 2.23, which has added the AVIF image format support to the web engine and that in addition the configuration of the ACG (Access Control Groups) access control model, used to limit the powers of the services, has been updated.
Regarding the support improvements we can find that it was added System support for the Raspberry Pi 3 module to work with g-camera-pipelin camerase, DRM support improvements are also highlighted.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- The Qt library has been updated to version 6.5.2.
- The UnifiedSinkBin component, which provides video rendering on different SoCs, was rewritten in Rust language.
- Fixed an issue where curl would crash due to DNS errors.
- Fixed an issue where the video would stop in the emulator if the playback speed was changed.
- Fixed an issue where the last tab would not close
- Fixed an issue where tapping on an empty area would not display a list of addresses after entering another address in the address bar.
- Fixed an issue where the screen layout would not adjust responsively while VKB was activated
- Fixed an issue where tooltips for WebEx menus were not appearing in RPi 4
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about this new released version, you can consult the details In the following link.
How to get webOS Open Source Edition 2.23?
For those who are interested in being able to use or test webOS Open Source Edition it is necessary to generate the system image for their device, for this they can consult the steps to follow from the following link
It is worth mentioning that the Raspberry Pi 4 boards are considered as the reference hardware platform. The platform is developed in a public repository under the Apache 2.0 license, and the development is supervised by the community, following a collaborative development management model.