============================================== Genode Labs Newsletter - February / March 2019 ============================================== Content 1. Release of the Sculpt CE operating system 2. Boot2Java - a system for Java-based network appliances 3. Genode OS Framework 19.02 released 1. Release of the Sculpt CE operating system -------------------------------------------- Mid of March, we released the fourth version of our Genode-based general-purpose operating system called Sculpt. It marks the final stage of the plan we envisioned one and a half years ago and is subtitled as "Community Experience" (CE). The background of this slogan is our ambition to remove the need for any middleman between developers and users. In contrast to today's mainstream OSes, which rely on ultimately trusted distributions or app stores, Sculpt works completely federated. The integrity of the installed software is protected by digital signatures of the software providers while each piece of software is sandboxed both at installation time and at runtime. This way, users don't need to be faithful but enter a position of ultimate control. This is capability-based security at work! As explained in the accompanying blog posting, Sculpt CE features a new user interface to integrate software into the running system and to reveal the trusted computing base of each component: https://genodians.org/nfeske/2019-03-19-sculpt-ce Sculpt CE is available as a ready-to-use disk image bootable from a USB stick. The release is accompanied with comprehensive documentation that covers both the use the system and the philosophy behind it. https://genode.org/download/sculpt disk image https://genode.org/documentation/articles/sculpt-ce documentation Without a middleman between software providers and users in Sculpt OS, there is the obvious question: How can a user find software? This is where our recently started community blog - Genodians.org - enters the picture. https://genodians.org It gives developers a way to announce new software while users can share their perspectives and ideas. Just like Sculpt OS, the content of Genodians.org is managed in a federated fashion. In the previous newsletter, we already announced the beta version of this blogging platform. In the meantime, we launched the site officially. We are happy that there are already more than 10 authors participating. 2. Boot2Java - a system for Java-based network appliances --------------------------------------------------------- Sculpt as a general purpose OS marks one end of the Genode spectrum. At the other end, there are embedded systems, which call for specially tailored and hardened appliance-like operating systems. The business logic of such systems is usually defined by experts in their product domain, and expressed in productivity languages, in particular Java. However, such domain experts are rarely operating-system specialists. Hence, IoT products often rely on off-the-shelf or vendor-provided variants of GNU/Linux or Android-based distributions and host higher-level language runtimes on top. The price for the quick time to market is the enormous complexity of the hardly-understood base system and the implicit dependency from regular software updates provided by the used OS vendor or distribution. With our new exemplary Boot2Java system, we offer the prospect to break free from such dependencies and risks. This Genode-based system boots directly into our version of the OpenJDK Java runtime to execute a Java network application. The application can communicate over one or more network interfaces with the outside world. The underlying Genode-based operating system is three orders of magnitude less complex compared to the current state-of-the-art solutions. This is good because with less complexity, less things can go wrong. The following article explains the idea in more detail: https://genodians.org/ssumpf/2019-02-27-java-19-02 The best part is that the system can be customized without diving deep into operating-system details. Changes like replacing the Java application, defining the network policy, or supplying a custom SSL certificate can be done directly on the boot medium (usually an SD card) without any further integration work. 3. Genode OS Framework 19.02 released ------------------------------------- The first Genode release of 2019 pays tribute to the this year's road map topic of making Genode relevant and attractive for a broader community. The two most prominent features are "Community Experience" version of Sculpt OS and the Genode version of OpenJDK. Sculpt CE makes Genode easier approachable for end users by introducing an easy-to-use way to discover, install, and integrate software originating from different providers. With OpenJDK, the world's most popular programming language becomes available to Genode users. Our port of the Hotspot Java virtual machine facilitates just-in-time compilation on both 32-bit ARM and 64-bit x86 architectures. Further highlights of Genode 19.02 are the improved runtimes for the Ada/SPARK and OCaml programming languages, and the added support for the i.MX6 Quad Sabrelite and Nitrogen6 SoloX boards. These and many more topics of the new version are covered in detail by the release documentation: https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/19.02 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: 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
