======================================= Genode Labs Newsletter - June/July 2012 ======================================= Content 1. Celebrate the 4th Anniversary of Genode with us 2. Interview in Revista Espírito Livre magazine 3. Genode comes to Pandaboard (Texas Instruments OMAP4) 4. NOVA Hypervisor supported on 64-bit x86 machines 1. Celebrate the 4th Anniversary of Genode with us -------------------------------------------------- When we released the first version of the Genode OS Framework four years ago, a few people recognized the potential of the technology but considered Genode largely as a research endeavor, which was probably right at that time. Now, four years of dedication and 16 releases later, Genode has evolved to a comprehensive and useful framework that increasingly captures the interest of the "real world". Over the course of the last year, we learned about several industrial research organizations who picked up our work to build upon, received inquiries about licensing our technology for the use in products, and observed increased public interest in the prospects Genode promises with regard to privacy and security. The most significant event for the project during the past year, however, was our move to liberate its development process and thereby expose our way of working and all technical discussions to the public. Although this was a radical move for a small company as ours, we got immediately rewarded by new developers and users entering the scene and an emerging community spirit. To celebrate these achievements together with us, we would like to welcome you to join us having a barbecue and campfire at the riverside: Google Maps: http://goo.gl/maps/C0luj 23th of August, 6 pm near Moritzburger Str. 1 in Dresden Everyone who feels attached to Genode in some way to another, please do not hesitate to drop by, hang out with the Genode crowd, and enjoy the barbecue and beverages. If you plan to attend, please send a brief notice until 20th of August to info@genode-labs.com 2. Interview in Revista Espírito Livre magazine ----------------------------------------------- The Brazilian Revista Espírito Livre is a magazine dedicated to Free and Open-Source software. With current issue 36, the Portuguese language magazine explores controversial questions about Internet freedom, privacy, neutrality among others. Genode seemingly represents a possible technical answer to some of these questions. For this reason Revista Espírito editor João Fernando asked us to explain our motives behind Genode in more detail. In the comprehensive interview starting at page 35, Genode co-founder Norman Feske talks about the background and motivation behind the project, describes the current structure of the community, and outlines his vision of the next generation of operating systems. Please visit the Revista Espírito Livre website to download the Portuguese-language magazine: http://www.revista.espiritolivre.org/lancada-edicao-n-36-da-revista-espirito-livre The English version of the interview can be found here: http://genode.org/about/interview_rel36 3. Genode comes to Pandaboard (Texas Instruments OMAP4) ------------------------------------------------------- Pandaboard (http://pandaboard.org) is a popular low-cost reference platform for the ARM-based OMAP4 SoC by Texas Instruments. It features a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, which is accompanied with peripherals such as HDMI output, LAN, SD-card, and USB. Over the course of the past three months, we have enhanced Genode with comprehensive support for this SoC. The results are already available at our Git repository and will become part of the upcoming release 12.08. The scope of platform support comprises drivers for USB HID, HDMI output, SD-card, and networking. Furthermore, there are ready-to-use Genode configurations for running one or multiple instances of L4Linux (on the Fiasco.OC kernel) on the Pandaboard. 4. NOVA Hypervisor supported on 64-bit x86 machines --------------------------------------------------- NOVA is a so-called microhypervisor for the x86 architecture. It combines the principles of microkernels with capability-based security and hardware-assisted virtualization. Genode supports NOVA as base platform since 2010. But because we used NOVA solely for sporadic research activities and NOVA was lacking a regular release schedule, Genode's platform support received only little attention. This has changed now. NOVA's main developer Udo Steinberg moved from TU Dresden to Intel Labs where he leads the development of NOVA as an Open-Source project. In fact, the code is now being hosted at GitHub: https://github.com/IntelLabs/NOVA This ignited our renewed interest in promoting this platform to a first-level citizen of our framework. The first significant improvement is the recently added 64-bit support of NOVA. We enabled Genode to work with both variants of the kernel - 32 and 64 bit. We congratulate the NOVA developers to this new model of development and open collaboration and look forward to work closely together! About the newsletter -------------------- If you have friends or colleagues who might be interested in our projects, we would appreciate you to forward this email. If you received this newsletter as a forwarded email, you may subscribe to the newsletter here: http://genode-labs.com/newsletter In the case of receiving this newsletter unintended, you can cancel your subscription at any time by replying to this email with the subject set to "unsubscribe". Best regards -- Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske Genode Labs http://www.genode-labs.com · http://genode.org Genode Labs GmbH · Amtsgericht Dresden · HRB 28424 · Sitz Dresden Geschäftsführer: Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske, Christian Helmuth
