========================================= Genode Labs Newsletter - April / May 2017 ========================================= Content 1. Hack'n'Hike in review 2. Introducing package management for Genode 3. Genode OS Framework 17.05 released 1. Hack'n'Hike in review ------------------------ Our yearly Hack'n'Hike community gathering is one of the most anticipated events for us Genode developers and friends. This May, the Hack'n'Hike led us to the beautiful Zittauer Gebirge nearby the town of Oybin. We were particularly excited about community members who followed our invitation, some coming over from as far as The Netherlands, Switzerland, or the UK. The historic villa that we picked as accommodation certainly contributed to the relaxing and creative atmosphere. Speaking of creativity, besides our daylight hiking activities, we worked on diverse fun projects. The coolest one was certainly the joint hacking session to run Quake 3 natively on Genode, including low-latency audio, butter-smooth hardware-accelerated graphics in full HD resolution, and network multi-player mode! Other topics ranged from VirtualBox 5 on top of Muen, Raspberry-3 support for the base-hw kernel, a port of Freeciv, tooling for Genode's new package-management system, and USB support for i.MX. Combined with a fine selection of beer, tasty barbecue, and good spring-time weather, what else could we wish for? 2. Introducing package management for Genode -------------------------------------------- A package-management solution is universally expected from a modern operating system. Until now, Genode's work flows were geared towards appliance-like systems that come in the shape of system images. However, as we experience with our day-to-day use of Genode as a general-purpose OS, there is a natural limit of how scalable such systems can be. The discussion of suitable package-management approaches for Genode reaches several years back. The first step in this direction were our custom tools for managing and integrating 3rd-party source code with Genode. But there was no notion of pre-built and easy-to-install packages, nor a tangible idea of what a package in the context of Genode should represent. During our exploratory line of work, we ultimately encountered and fell in love with the Nix package manager. This encounter was followed by porting efforts and mind-bending architectural discussions. We eventually realized that Genode gives us unique opportunities for simplifications thanks to the control that we have over the entire software stack including the build system, tool chain, the ABI and API design, the inter-component protocols, the dynamic linker, the system configuration, and the execution runtime. Enabled by this holistic view, we came up with a strikingly simple new approach, which is described here: https://genode.org/documentation/developer-resources/package_management Even though officially labeled as experimental, the new tools allow a glimpse at Genode's future as a truly scalable operating system. 3. Genode OS Framework 17.05 released ------------------------------------- We just published the mid-year release of the Genode OS framework. This version is special as it is designated as the starting point for well maintainable development branches. This ambition motivated us to update the framework's tool chain as well as our ports of Qt and VirtualBox to current versions. It also prompted us to wrap up our great API and architectural renovation work that we kicked off one year ago. Feature-wise, the most important news are the addition of Genode's package-management solution, new tools for monitoring network traffic and CPU load, the support for the Nim and Ada programming languages, greatly enhanced flexibility of the init component, and a brand new timeout API. All the improvements are covered in great detail in the release documentation: https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/17.05 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: https://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 https://www.genode-labs.com/ · https://genode.org/ https://twitter.com/GenodeLabs · /ˈdʒiː.nəʊd/ Genode Labs GmbH · Amtsgericht Dresden · HRB 28424 · Sitz Dresden Geschäftsführer: Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske, Christian Helmuth
