============================================== Genode Labs Newsletter - February / March 2014 ============================================== Content 1. Genode OS Framework 14.02 released 2. Our custom ARM kernel gains multi-processor support 3. FOSDEM 2014 roundup 1. Genode OS Framework 14.02 released ------------------------------------- With Genode 14.02 released end of February, we have made our port of VirtualBox to the NOVA microhypervisor publicly available. Thereby, Genode users have become able to combine the security benefits of microkernel technology with a product-grade virtualization solution that supports a wide range of guest operating systems including MS Windows. Besides the addition of VirtualBox, the work on version 14.02 was primarily focused on storage. Genode's block-level infrastructure was redesigned to use asynchronous communication, which clears the way to future performance optimizations. As a first step to address block-device performance, the new version features a new block cache component. At file-system level, the port of FUSE-based file systems has been extended to cover NTFS. Additionally, we added support for using a variety of NetBSD file systems, enabled by the use of so- called rump kernels. Among the many further improvements that come with the new version are a pseudo file system that allows the interactive use of Genode's tracing facilities via Unix commands, a profound unification of the various graphics back ends used throughout the framework, a new facility for propagating status reports, and improvements of the Noux runtime for executing Unix software on Genode. 2. Our custom ARM kernel gains multi-processor support ------------------------------------------------------ Our road map for 2014 envisions vast improvements of our custom kernel platform called base-hw with respect to virtualization, capability-based security, real-time scheduling, and multi-processor support. We are happy to report that the latter feature has just landed in the mainline version of Genode. On traditional L4 kernels, multi-processor support is a challenging topic. However, the design of our kernel largely deviates from the existing members of the L4 kernel family by reducing the kernel to a mere library that is co-located with the user-level core process. By removing the line between kernel and user land, we can leverage Genode's user-level infrastructure to solve kernel problems that are extremely difficult to solve in self-sufficient classical L4 kernels, for example the in-kernel memory management. The ease of adding multi-processor support, which took us only about 2 months, is just another example that reinforces the benefits of our approach. Instead of implementing complicated inter-processor protocols in the kernel, we solve typical kernel-level problems such as cross-processor TLB shootdown elegantly at user level. The base-hw multi-processor support is readily available at the current master branch of Genode: https://github.com/genodelabs/genode 3. FOSDEM 2014 roundup ---------------------- FOSDEM 2014 has been great! Genode Labs attended in the form of Stefan, Alexander, Josef, and myself. We greatly enjoyed the atmosphere that is created when thousands of enthusiasts for Open Source and Free Software meet. The microkernel developer room was more diverse than last year. We particularly enjoyed the participation of people who are not in the inner circle of the microkernel developer community but pursue interests that somehow intersect with the problem space of microkernels. For example, Antti Kantee presented his work on NetBSD rump kernels and Michael Engel tried to give an inspiring wake-up call to rethink OS resource management. Genode Labs contributed two presentations to the microkernel developer room. Stefan shared his experiences with exploring ARM TrustZone technology and I gave an overview of our achievements towards general-purpose computing. Both talks were garnished with several live demos running on real hardware. The slides of both talks as well as a video recording of my talk are available here: http://genode.org/about/publications 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
