======================================= Genode Labs Newsletter - April/May 2011 ======================================= Content 1. Co-developer of Genode FX spawns new startup company 2. Genode OS developer community on the rise 3. Version 11.05 of the Genode OS Framework 1. Co-developer of Genode FX spawns new startup company ------------------------------------------------------- Our longtime friend and co-developer of the Genode FPGA Graphics Project Matthias Alles has founded his own company called Creonic together with his partner Timo Lehnigk-Emden. Both have an impressive track record for developing IP cores in the field of communication systems at the University of Kaiserslautern and founded their company with the vision to transfer their scientific results to real-world products. In May, the Creonic website went online: http://creonic.com We at Genode Labs feel closely connected to Creonic because both companies share a very similar founding story. Driven by the utmost dedication for pushing technology forward in a self-determined way combined with enthusiasm for high-quality engineering, both companies were started with the premises of self funding and organic growth. We congratulate the founders of Creonic on having successfully launched their company and look forward to a fruitful partnership between Creonic and Genode Labs for the many years of business to come. 2. Genode OS developer community on the rise --------------------------------------------- Since the very first Open-Source release in summer 2008, we envisioned the Genode OS Framework to become a community-driven project used by creative individuals, companies, and students as a platform to conduct new ideas in OS research. We had to learn that communities do not grow over night. Instead, getting people interested in our technology has been a long-winded process. Now, we experience that our patience is getting rewarded by several new people joining the Genode developer community since the beginning of 2011. We are especially delighted about having become acquainted with the Systems Research Group of Samsung (SISA) that shares our far-reaching vision of the future of operating systems. We are grateful to this group for having supported the development of several new features as found in the latest Genode OS release through funding and advice. Welcome to the Genode OS developer community! 3. Version 11.05 of the Genode OS Framework ------------------------------------------- In line with our three-months release cycle, we have published the version 11.05 of the Genode OS Framework. With this version, we pursued two goals, revisiting the framework's mechanisms inter-process communication and advancing the support for the base platforms that we introduced in February. The reliance on inter-process communication is the most fundamental characteristic of microkernel-based operating systems. Because Genode is based on a microkernel-based architecture, we consider an efficient, robust, and easy-to-use programming interface for inter-process communication as crucial for the success of the Genode OS technology. When the Genode project was started in 2006, we dismissed the time-tested solutions of the day in favor of an original approach called dynamic RPC marshalling. Even though our custom solution served us well over the last five years, it had its own share of limitations and deficiencies, most importantly the lack of type safety and the need for manual maintenance of communication code. Now, we have taken the chance to create a new framework API that takes our long-year experience into full account and thereby resolves all of the known limitations of Genode's inter-process communication facility. In February, we introduced the Fiasco.OC kernel as well as a custom kernel for the MicroBlaze architecture as new base platforms. These new platforms received a lot of attention. We are happy to report that the Fiasco.OC base platform has become capable of executing the entire Genode software stack including the dynamic linker, Qt4, lwIP, and the steadily growing number of device drivers. Furthermore, we have made the classical workload of Fiasco.OC, namely L4Linux, available on Genode. For the complete story with further news such as experimental support for GDB, and ARM RealView device drivers, please have a look at our full release-notes documentation: http://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/11.05 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
