============================================== Genode Labs Newsletter - October/November 2008 ============================================== Content 1. Live CD presenting the Genode OS architecture 2. Release of the Genode OS Framework version 8.11 3. Extended platform support for Genode FPGA Graphics 1. Live CD presenting the Genode OS architecture ------------------------------------------------ Since we launched the Genode project in August, we got requests from several people with an interest in exploring the Genode architecture but were hesitant to compile Genode from source code. To lower the bar for getting practical experience with Genode, we have created a live CD that can be started directly on standard PC hardware, the Qemu emulator, and VirtualBox. The live CD contains an interactive demonstration scenario, letting the user start and kill sub systems, assign memory quotas, and enforce dynamic policies. You can find the download of the CD's ISO image and usage information here: http://genode.org/download/live-cds 2. Genode OS Framework release 8.11 ----------------------------------- With the release 8.11, the Genode project reached an important milestone towards the realization of real-world applications. The current version addresses two crucial preconditions for the practical use of the framework, the availability of device drivers, and a way to enable existing C code bases to be ported to Genode. Our new device-driver API called DDE kit allows for the reuse of existing C-written device drivers at low engineering costs. For facilitating the porting of the wealth of existing open-source libraries to Genode, we have complemented the base framework with a C runtime ported from FreeBSD. Among the numerous changes and additions are a new API for asynchronous notifications, consistent typification of capabilities, and a new experimental feature called managed dataspaces. The complete compilation of improvements and new features are detailed in the release notes for Genode 8.11: http://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/8.11 For downloading the latest release as source-code snapshot or directly from our public subversion repository, please visit the download section the project's website: http://genode.org/download 3. Extended platform support for Genode FPGA Graphics ----------------------------------------------------- The original version of the Genode FPGA Graphics (FX) project relied on the Xilinx Spartan 3A Starter Kit as reference platform. Since then, we have continuously enhanced the number of supported platforms. Thanks to our ongoing work and the community support, our project received, we can now report that Genode FX runs on the whole range of current Xilinx FPGAs. The official distribution comes with ready-to-use EDK projects for the following platforms: - Virtex-4-based Xilinx ML405 evaluation platform using VGA *new* - Virtex-5-based Xilinx ML507 evaluation platform using DVI - Spartan 3A and 3AN Starter-Kit boards using 12bit VGA - Spartan 3E Starter-Kit board using 3bit VGA *new* To further ease the adoption of Genode FX for custom FPGA plat- forms, we have thoroughly documented the process of porting both the hardware and software of Genode FX to a new platform, taking the ML405 as an example: http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=132123&group_id=237260 The current version 8.10 of Genode FX is freely available for download via the project website: http://genode-labs.com/products/fpga-graphics 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 -- Norman Feske Genode Labs http://www.genode-labs.com ยท http://genode.org
