===================================================== Genode Labs Newsletter - December 2013 / January 2014 ===================================================== Content 1. Road Map for 2014 2. VirtualBox on top of the NOVA hypervisor 3. Facilitating third-party software on Genode 1. Road Map for 2014 -------------------- The past year was not short of exciting developments around Genode. We are particularly happy to have developed all the puzzle pieces needed to use the capabilities of the NOVA hypervisor to the full extend, including the use of IOMMUs, multi-processor support, and hardware virtualization. Another line of development was the creation of extensive platform support for the Samsung Exynos 5 SoC, including SATA 3.0, USB 3.0, HDMI, networking, eMMC, and power management. This makes Exynos-5 the first ARM platform that is thoroughly supported by Genode. As a surprising turn of events, our custom kernel for ARM-based hardware emerged from a mere experiment to a fully featured base platform, which became able to carry the entirety of Genode's software stack on top. These are just a few highlights among many others such as the use of the Linux TCP/IP stack as a library, the switch to Qt5, FUSE-based file systems, and new event-tracing capabilities. The turn of the year prompted us to lay out the plans for 2014. This year, we will focus our attention on four areas: Advancing our custom ARM kernel, facilitating the combination of third-party software with Genode, provisioning components needed for reliable, secure and high-performance storage, and building a novel user interface. Those topics along with rough time line are described in our updated official road map: http://genode.org/about/road-map 2. VirtualBox on top of the NOVA hypervisor ------------------------------------------- We are proud to announce the upcoming support for VirtualBox on top of Genode/NOVA. VirtualBox is a product-quality and highly popular virtualization solution developed by Oracle. It is available across a variety of operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris. The appeal of VirtualBox comes from its breadth of supported guest operating systems and its extensive feature set. On the traditionally supported host operating systems, VirtualBox exercises control over the whole machine as it hooks itself under- neath the kernel of the host operating system. So the user must ultimately trust VirtualBox. In contrast, the NOVA architecture devises a different approach where the virtual-machine monitor runs as an ordinary user-level program without any special privileges. Since last summer, we pondered over the question of how it might be possible to combine the rich feature set of VirtualBox with the vastly better security model of NOVA. We eventually identified a viable route to take and followed that road. To our delight, we found that it is indeed possible to bring together both technologies! The first version of VirtualBox for Genode/NOVA will be part of the upcoming Genode release scheduled for end of February. 3. Facilitating third-party software on Genode ---------------------------------------------- With the growing diversity of the Genode community, there comes the increasing need to use existing third-party software on the platform. One way to go is using virtualization. But for the goal of using Genode as primary OS, this can only be a stop-gap solution. In the long run, we have to take on the challenge to natively support popular software by the means of porting and packaging. This realization prompted us to address this topic as part of our official road map. An important step in this direction is to spread the knowledge and methodology about how to port existing software to the Genode world. The just published "Genode Porting Guide" takes developers step by step through the process of porting libraries, applications, and device drivers: http://genode.org/documentation/developer-resources/porting 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
