============================================== Genode Labs Newsletter - October/November 2012 ============================================== Content 1. Meet us at FOSDEM 2012 2. Genode OS Framework 12.11 released 3. How Genode came to the Pandaboard 1. Meet us at FOSDEM 2012 ------------------------- FOSDEM is the world's largest gathering of the Open-Source and Free- Software developer community. The yearly event held in Brussels attracts the participants and users of a manifold kinds of projects, including end-user applications, data bases, programming languages, development frameworks, and operating systems. In the previous event in February 2012, Jakub Jermar of the HelenOS team initiated a developer room especially geared towards microkernel-based operating systems. We greatly enjoyed participating. The developer room turned out to be extremely helpful for the projects to come more closely together. For example, thanks to FOSDEM, we started to engage much more with exchanging ideas with the HelenOS team, and got in touch with Ksys-Labs who eventually became contributors to the Genode OS Framework. For the upcoming FOSDEM held during 2nd and 3rd of February 2013, Genode Labs takes over the role as the shepherd of the microkernel dev room. We invite all Open-Source and Free-Software projects that have a stake in microkernels or component-based operating systems to join in. Please find the invitation at the following link https://lists.fosdem.org/pipermail/microkernel-devroom/2012-October/000054.html Whether you are involved in OS development or not, if you like to meet us in person, FOSDEM will be an excellent opportunity. We are looking forward to see you there! 2. Genode OS Framework 12.11 released ------------------------------------- We are happy to announce the release of the version 12.11 of the Genode OS Framework with the bold statement that Genode has become able to build Genode. For us developers, this is a symbolic event that underlines our ambition to shape the framework into a general- purpose operating system that is capable to carry real-world work- load. Pursuing this line of development involved working on many construction sites, ranging from addressing shortcomings of the used kernels, over improving the base framework, supporting third-party libraries, crafting a glue layer between the Genode API and the GNU userland, and porting the actual tool-chain components to the Genode environment. Besides the major topic of self-hosting Genode, the new version comes with updated and largely improved support for the different base platforms. For example, our custom kernel for ARM hardware has been enhanced to cover the Freescale i.MX and Texas Instruments OMAP4 SoCs. The Linux base platform has been fundamentally revisited to make this version of the framework more attractive as a middle- ware solution for building component-based software on Linux. Functionality-wise, there are new audio drivers ported from the Open Sound System as well as enhanced support for OMAP4 peripherals. To learn more about these and many more improvements, please refer to the release notes: http://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/12.11 3. How Genode came to the Pandaboard ------------------------------------ At Genode Labs, we spend most of our days with working on the deep internals of operating systems including the development of device drivers, improving OS kernels, and optimizing application performance. We thoroughly enjoy these kind of work because there are constantly new things to discover and the experience of bringing a custom-created operating system to life is just exciting. During the past 6 months, our team has invested significant efforts into exploring the ARM- based Pandaboard platform. The outcome of this work is the profound support of this platform by the Genode OS Framework. To give you a glimpse over our shoulders, we have documented our steps in the form of an experience report. If you are interested in low-level operating-system development, we hope you will enjoy our article about "How Genode came to the Pandaboard" as much as we enjoyed our work on this topic: http://genode.org/documentation/articles/pandaboard 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
