============================================== Genode Labs Newsletter - February / March 2015 ============================================== Content 1. Hack'n'Hike 2015 2. An in-depth look into the ARM virtualization extensions 3. Genode OS Framework 15.02 released 1. Hack'n'Hike 2015 ------------------- This year's Hack'n'Hike during 22nd - 25th of May is approaching. Like in the previous years, we will gather for several days in a cosy accommodation to enjoy outdoor activities, collaborative hacking, and relaxation. For everyone interested in getting involved with the community, catching up, or just hanging out with the Genode crowd - feel welcome to join us in the so-called Turmvilla: Hermannsbad 9, 02953 Bad Muskau, Germany http://www.turmvilla.de/www/ There is still room for more participants. Genode Labs sponsors the event. So your participation/accommodation is free. To simplify the organization for us, please let us know till the 7th of May if you like to join in. Either write to hacknhike@genode-labs.com or comment on the Hack'n'Hike topic at our issue tracker: https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/issues/1256 Also, if you have suggestions or questions regarding the Hack'n'Hike, do not hesitate to contact us via the email address above. 2. An in-depth look into the ARM virtualization extensions ---------------------------------------------------------- Our experience report about ARM TrustZone technology, which we published in April last year was very well received. Shortly after we published it, we could see several people taking our TrustZone- monitor implementation as starting point for experimentation. The article even ended up as a reference for TrustZone at the Wikipedia page for the ARM architecture! This positive feedback indicates that there exists a demand for highly technical articles covering low-level OS technology. With our new article "An in-depth look into the ARM virtualization extensions", we follow up on our TrustZone-related work by exploring the hardware virtualization capabilities of the ARMv7 architecture: http://genode.org/documentation/articles/arm_virtualization The line of work described in the article was conducted during the year 2014 with the goal to use our custom kernel as a hypervisor plat- form. The article introduces the hardware-virtualization mechanisms of ARMv7 and presents our aspired virtualization architecture. It then goes into detail about the virtualization of memory, CPU, interrupts, and time. It closes with a series of experiments with I/O protection mechanisms as present on modern ARM-based SoCs. 3. Genode OS Framework 15.02 released ------------------------------------- End of February, we released the version 15.02 of the Genode OS Framework, which introduces a highly modularized tool kit for automated testing, adds support for the USB Armory platform, improves the performance and stability of VirtualBox on Genode/NOVA, and contains the practical results of our work on ARM virtualization. Most of the previous releases were motivated by our desire for features that we deemed as fundamentally important to use Genode as a general-purpose system. Now that we have reached most of the feature set that we longed after, the project adjusts its focus. According to our road map for this year, the underlying theme of the current development shifted towards the cultivation of the existing feature set rather than the introduction of new functionality. The release 15.02 perfectly reflects this change. It introduces a highly modular tool kit for scaling up the project's automated testing efforts and comes with stability and performance improvements all over the place. In particular, we are happy to report substantial performance gains of our version of VirtualBox running on NOVA. As a second focus of the version 15.02, our custom base-hw kernel platform received a lot of attention. The most prominent news is the added support for virtualization on ARM. This line of work took much of our prior experience with the NOVA virtualization architecture and ARM TrustZone into account. This experience resulted in a novel microhypervisor design with an extremely tiny foot print with respect to the added complexity on the account of virtualization support. In fact, less than 1000 lines of code had to be added to the root of the trusted computing base. Besides virtualization support, our kernel's scheduler got refined to take IPC relationships into account while additionally gaining support for the USB Armory hardware platform. These and many more improvements are covered in more detail in the release documentation: http:/documentation/release-notes/15.02 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
