New Directions in Operating Systems Nov 03, 2014

Norman Feske will present Genode at the "New Directions in Operating Systems" conference on November 25 in London.

The vastly distributed and interconnected systems of today call for new innovation in operating systems. In particular, the increasing demands for scalability, security, privacy, ease of deployment, and flexibility prompts the OS developer community to move into new directions or to reignite existing approaches in the light of today. Those directions include containerization, capability-based security, library OSes, virtual networking, formal verification, and various flavors of virtualization.

With the conference "New Directions in Operating Systems", Justin Cormack of the Rumpkernel community sets out to bring the respective developer communities closer together. Genode intersects with many of the topics of the conference - be it as a user of Rumpkernels, as an implementation of capability-based security, or as representative of the microkernel family of systems. Hence, we are delighted about the chance to join the conference on November 25 in London:

New Directions in Operating Systems

November 25, 2014, London

If you are as excited about OS development as we are, or you just like to catch up with us, we recommend you to join in!

Genode OS Framework version 14.08 released Sep 30, 2014

The current version 14.08 of the Genode OS framework introduces a new architecture for graphical user interfaces (GUI) designed from the ground up to protect the privacy of the user and application security.

In August, we complemented Genode with a host of new features introduced with version 14.08. The flagship of those features is a new GUI architecture that retains an extremely low complexity for its security-critical parts while offering vast flexibility when it comes to customization and graphical presentation. The key for achieving this flexibility is the unique way how the GUI is composed out of several small components that work together. Each of those components can be replaced individually. The new GUI stack furthermore allowed us to greatly improve the integration of Qt5 with Genode.

Genode's OS infrastructure received a major upgrade with pluggable VFS file systems, the move of the Linux device driver environment to Linux version 3.14.5, and a new port of OpenVPN. When it comes to the supported base platforms, the new version comes with an update of the NOVA microhypervisor and boosts the performance of our custom base-hw kernel on ARM-based platforms.

These and many more changes are described in detail in the accompanied release documentation...

Genode OS Framework version 14.05 released Jun 20, 2014

Version 14.05 of the Genode OS Framework greatly improves the integration of 3rd-party software, introduces block-level encryption, and adds multi-processor support to our custom kernel platform.

Following our quarterly release cycle, we have published the version 14.05 of the Genode OS Framework. This time, the release is focused on improving the scalability of the framework with regard to the interoperability with 3rd-party software. The new version comes with tools that make the integration and use of existing software with Genode easier than ever.

Besides those infrastructural changes, the new version comes with vast improvements of the NOVA and base-hw kernel platforms. Our custom base-hw kernel for ARM-based devices received multi-processor support and a new memory management, we enabled the use of real-time priorities on NOVA, and continued our efforts with running VirtualBox on NOVA by adding support for guest additions.

Furthermore, we added a new component for block-level encryption based on NetBSD's cryptographic device driver and enabled USB 3.0 on x86 platforms.

More information about all the changes are provided in our detailed release documentation...

Genode OS Framework version 14.02 released Mar 12, 2014

With version 14.02, the Genode OS Framework gains support for NetBSD's file systems and becomes able to run VirtualBox on top of the NOVA microhypervisor.

The focus of Genode 14.02 lies on storage and virtualization. Thanks to a redesign of its block-level API to operate asynchronously, the framework becomes able to benefit from optimizations that hide block-access latencies and maximize throughput. A new block cache further boosts the performance at block-device level. At the file-system level, the framework started to leverage the variety of time-tested file systems of the NetBSD kernel on microkernel platforms. With regard to virtualization, the added support for running VirtualBox on the NOVA microhypervisor clears the way for using microkernel technology in application areas where compatibility to commodity OSes like MS Windows is needed. More details about these and many more improvements are provided by the extensive release documentation...

Meet Genode Labs at FOSDEM 2014 Jan 06, 2014

Genode Labs will participate in this year's FOSDEM with two presentations at the microkernel developer room.

FOSDEM is the worlds largest gathering of Open-Source and Free-Software enthusiasts. Following the tradition of the past years, this year's edition will again host a so-called devroom specifically for microkernel-based systems. This time, TU Dresden has taken over the stewardship for the devroom. It goes without saying that Genode Labs will participate. There will be two presentations, specifically related to Genode:

09:55 - 10:40 Genode as general-purpose OS - Progress report and demonstration Norman Feske

15:00 - 15:30 Virtualization Dungeon on ARM Stefan Kalkowski

As usual, those presentations will be garnished with demonstrations. Besides our contributions, the devroom will cover many other intriguing topics related to the Open-Source microkernel community. The devroom schedule for the whole day is available here:

https://fosdem.org/2014/schedule/track/microkernel_based_operating_systems

If you are interested in Open-Source microkernel technology, or if you just like to catch up, we warmly recommend attending FOSDEM 2014 and the microkernel devroom in particular:

https://fosdem.org/2014