Sculpt OS 22.04 Apr 30, 2022

Version 22.04 of the Genode-based Sculpt general-purpose operating system leverages up-to-date device drivers ported from the Linux kernel, makes hardware-accelerated graphics usable for virtual machines, and introduces service-level sandboxing.

With the Sculpt OS version 22.04 released end of April, users of our Genode-based general-purpose OS can enjoy completely new drivers for wireless, graphics, and USB. In a major surgery, the new drivers got transplanted from the Linux kernel version 5.14.21 using Genode's unique DDE approach. In contrast to Linux where the drivers are part of the almighty operating-system kernel, Sculpt OS hosts each of the drivers in a dedicated sandbox as plain user-level component. So users can benefit from the broad hardware support of up-to-date Linux drivers without ultimately trusting those staggeringly complex driver stacks.

Closely related, the support of hardware-accelerated graphics that we introduced with the previous version 21.10 received substantial optimization and stabilization. With the new version, Sculpt users can not only run native OpenGL applications but can even go as far as using hardware-accelerated graphics via guest operating systems hosted within VirtualBox on top of Sculpt OS.

Besides the hardware-related improvements, the new version equips the user with additional means to exercise control over the deployed software: A new optional component called black hole can now be used as placeholder for various system resources when deploying an application. For example, a virtual machine can be shielded from the network by connecting its network traffic to the black hole. This also works for audio, video capturing, USB, and other commonly used system resources.

Sculpt OS 22.04 is available as ready-to-use system image, accompanied with up-to-date documentation.