============================================== Genode Labs Newsletter - February / March 2016 ============================================== Content 1. How Genode came to RISC-V 2. Introducing the Genode-World repository 3. Genode OS Framework 16.02 released 1. How Genode came to RISC-V ---------------------------- In November, we laid out our plan to integrate support for the RISC-V CPU architecture into Genode. RISC-V captured our interest for two reasons. First, it is developed from the ground up as an open-source hardware project and aided by renowned experts like David Patterson. It has high ambitions, substance, and a strong backing. Second, it is designed to scale from microcontrollers to 64-bit general-purpose computing. We started to bring Genode to RISC-V in summer last year. After creating a prototype running on an emulator, we teamed up with our friends at NL Cyber Security Labs to run it on a RISC-V softcore CPU synthesized on an FPGA platform. At the beginning of 2016, we wrapped up this line of work and integrated it into the mainline Genode version. It is featured by the current release 16.02. While conducting the practical work, we took the chance to document the steps taken and published this experience report: http://genode.org/documentation/articles/riscv The article is geared towards people interested in the practical use of RISC-V, and developers who aspire to port Genode to new CPU architectures. To our delight, the article has quickly drawn attention to our project, for example: http://www.rambusblog.com/2016/03/24/genode-os-adds-risc-v-support/ 2. Introducing the Genode-World repository ------------------------------------------ With its growing community, Genode receives an increasing number of contributions from developers outside of Genode Labs. Many of those contributions are concerned with functionality on top of Genode rather than changes of the inner parts of the framework. We recognized that the integration of such features into our mainline development will ultimately become a bottleneck because we need to reach out to each individual contributor to sign our contributors agreement, have to carefully review the code, and cover it by our automated tests. To overcome this scalability problem and to lower the barrier of contributing to Genode, we have now introduced as new repository called "Genode World", which complements the mainline Genode repository with community- managed components: https://github.com/genodelabs/genode-world The repository can be seamlessly integrated into the work flows of Genode and thereby makes 3rd-party components easily available to users. It is primarily meant as a hub for ported software to avoid the situation where software is ported twice because developers are unaware of each other's work. But it is also the designated place for genuine components that do not fit into the narrow scope of the Genode OS Framework but rather have a supplemental role. 3. Genode OS Framework 16.02 released ------------------------------------- End of February, we released the version 16.02 of the Genode OS Framework. It enables the dynamic assignment of USB devices to VirtualBox instances, adds support for the RISC-V architecture, updates the Muen separation kernel to version 0.7 including MSI support, and updates seL4 to version 2.1. These are merely the highlights. The full description of the numerous improvements is covered by the release documentation: http://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/16.02 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
