Genode Labs News
Genode OS Framework version 10.02 released
The new release 10.02 of the Genode OS Framework is available. With this release, the project further broadens the field of applications for Genode by introducing support for two new kernels: the Codezero kernel and the NOVA hypervisor. The former is primarily targeted at ARM platforms, the latter at x86 virtualization. Moreover, there is a new management concept for real-time priorities, which can be used in conjunction with the real-time schedulers of the L4ka::Pistachio and OKL4 kernels. Beside many improvements and refinements of the existing parts of the framework, we incorporated the initial port of the Python script interpreter into this release.
The substantial base-platform enhancements introduced with the current release are motivated by our goal to establish the framework as a unified development environment for implementing dynamic workload on microkernel-based system and at the same time enable users to benefit from the strengths of the different kernels.
Read on about the new base platforms and the many improvements of the framework in the release notes for version 10.02...
Genode Labs leaves behind its infancy
In spring 2008, Genode Labs was founded with the simplest legal status possible, a loose bond of two persons, in Germany called Gesellschaft bürgerlichen Rechts (GbR). This provided an unbureaucratic, cheap, and quick way to get our business going. In December, we left this stage behind and changed the legal status to "Gesellschaft mit beschränker Haftung" (GmbH), which is comparible with a british Limited and the most common legal status used for private companies in Germany. For us this important symbolic step marks the completion of the intial bootstrapping procedure of our venture.
Genode OS Framework version 9.11 released
With the release 9.11 of the Genode OS framework, we start to fully leverage the strong underpinnings of the framework built-up with the previous releases. This enabled us to introduce major new functionality such as a paravirtualized Linux kernel, which allows the execution of off-the-shelf Linux programs isolated from security-sensitive applications, both executed on the same machine. For native Genode applications, we significantly improved the infrastructure by making standard programming interfaces such as socket-based TCP/IP, and popular libraries such as Freetype2 available. The completeness of this infrastructure is best illustrated by our native port of the Qt4/Webkit browser engine to the framework. With regard to driver support, we extended our Linux-device-driver environment, which facilitates the use of unmodified Linux drivers as separate processes on Genode. In particular, the current release complements our USB stack with support for USB storage devices.
These changes and a long list of further improvements are described in full detail in the release notes of version 9.11...
Live CD demonstrating latest Genode features
Shortly, after our first company's birthday we are proud to present to you some of the latest features incorporated in Genode in form of a new Live CD. Beside of the already known graphical demonstration of Genode's architecture, it features small demos of the QT4 support and Linux running on top of Genode. This version runs on Qemu, VirtualBox, or PC hardware. Download the ISO image at Genode project website...
Genode FX for Trenz Electronic industrial FPGA modules
On the size of only 40.5mm x 47.5mm, the TE0300 industrial FPGA module integrates a Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA, DDR memory, configuration flash, and power supply on one module to be used as OEM board or in combination with application-specific carrier boards such as the TE0304. As displayed in the image (courtesy of Trenz Electronic), this particular carrier board makes the general-purpose I/O pins of the FPGA available for display-output and PS/2-input devices, and therefore, allows the implementation of Genode FX on the TE0300 platform. Combined, Genode FX and the TE0300 + TE0304 forms a fully-fledged embedded GUI solution at a low footprint with regard to hardware and software complexity, and power consumption.
We have included reference designs for a range of TE0300 modules to the project's official source tree, and with the next release of Genode FX, the TE0300 support will become a regular part of the official Genode FX distribution.
Visit the Trenz Electronic webshop for TE0300 + TE0304 FPGA modules...
Genode OS Framework version 9.08 released
Genode Labs is pleased to announce the availability of the 1st anniversary release of the Genode OS Framework. This framework allows for building custom operating systems for application areas where dynamic workloads meet high security and robustness requirements. The approach of the framework is the combination of micro-kernel technology with a novel OS architecture, optimized for minimizing the complexity of critical applications. One unique feature of the framework is the support of different kernels as base platform, each kernel providing different characteristics.
The new version 9.08 comes with improvements all over the code base and introduces new features such as a dynamic linker, and long desired support for super pages and write-combined I/O access. As described in the release notes, the overall theme of this release had been refinement, resulting in much improved implementations for key parts of the framework. In particular, Genode's synchronization primitives such as locks and signals have received much attention, and the central timer service has been replaced by a much improved implementation.
Furthermore, there are many improvements for the specfic base platforms. The OKL4-kernel support, added with the previous release, motivated code unifications among all four supported kernel platforms. The kernel-specific lines of code, which provide complete kernel abstractions, have become as little as 1800 (OKL4), 1500 (Linux), 1600 (L4/Fiasco), and 2000 (L4ka::Pistachio) lines of C++ code.
With regard to Linux as base platform, the project reached its goal to make the base framework completely independent from Linux' userland infrastructure. Genode can now be executed on the raw Linux kernel without linking against glibc. Thereby, the Linux version of Genode is on the way to become the lowest-complexity (regarding source-code complexity) Linux-kernel-based OS available.
The introduction of the dynamic linker ported from FreeBSD promises a significant reduction of binary sizes and, thereby, will finally allay fears about the resource requirements of using Qt4 on Genode.
Read on about all the improvements in the release notes for version 9.08...
First anniversary of the Genode OS Framework
In August 2008, Genode Labs released the first version of the Genode OS Framework. Since then, we have come a long way and are pretty excited about the things achieved within the past year. We will celebrate the first anniversary of the Genode OS Framework with a barbecue on
view location on the map
Genode OS Framework version 9.05 released
With the release 9.05, we continue our efforts to make the Genode OS Framework available for a broad user base. Therefore, we further enhanced the platform support by bringing Genode to 64-bit Linux and to the OKL4 kernel. With regard to the framework's functionality, the release features the version 4.5.1 of the Qt application framework and introduces the first parts of our USB stack including USB host-controller drivers and a human-interface device driver.
Read on about all the new features and changes described in the release notes...
Download the latest release...
Paper about the Genode FPGA Graphics Project
This paper presents a composition of hardware and software that forms a fully fledged windowed GUI on a single FPGA plus memory chip. The solution scales with the full range of Xilinx FPGAs. But even on the low-cost Xilinx Spartan3A FPGA, the GUI operating at a 16bit resolution of 640x480 is able to guarantee a bounded output latency of only 220 ms and a guaranteed response time to user input of less then 20 ms. The paper covers both an overview of our custom hardware design and our software algorithms that make these guarantees possible.
Genode FX: an FPGA-based GUI with Bounded Output Latency and Guaranteed Responsiveness to User Input
Norman Feske and Matthias Alles
Technical Report, Genode Labs, May 2009
On the 14th of May, we presented the Genode FPGA Project at the 10. Workshop Mikrocontroller-Applikation in Mittweida. The following german summary of our paper appeared in the accompanying proceedings.
Genode FX: eine FPGA-basierte grafische Benutzerschnittstelle
Norman Feske
Tagungsband, 10. Workshop Mikrocontroller-Applikation, Mittweida, 14. Mai 2009
Genode FPGA Graphics Project version 9.03 released
In contrast to the previous releases, which improved the hardware side of Genode FX, the release 9.3 brings the first major software update. We enhanced the software stack to support the rendering of antialiased fonts, made effects such as drop shadows and translucent windows configurable at runtime, and restructured the graphics backend to ease the future support of different pixel formats. The highlight of this release, however, is a completely new demonstration project featuring a terminal window to directly interact with the GUI via its command interface, a new settings window, a slide show, and a grid widget demo. Download the new release at the project's Sourceforge site...
Full text of "Securing Graphical User Interfaces" published
Malware such as Trojan Horses and spyware remain to be persistent security threats that exploit the overly complex graphical user interfaces of today's commodity operating systems. Current GUI architectures have to find a balance between the four conflicting goals of maintaining compatibility to existing applications, providing quality of service, operating at high performance, and of being secure, whereby the latter goal still remains widely disregarded by mainstream GUI architectures. The challenge of Norman Feske's work was to resolve the conflict. He developed key techniques and substantiated the concepts by a number of exhaustive experiments. The resulting architecture consolidates the advantages of extremely low source-code complexity, full client isolation, protection against spyware and Trojan Horses, bounded output latency, and compatibility to existing applications into one GUI-server design.
Visit the publications page at genode.org...
Genode OS Framework version 9.02 released
With the February release of the Genode OS Framework, we continue our efforts to make the framework available on a broader range of microkernel platforms. Most of today's microkernel developments use to bring along a kernel-specific user land as programming environment for user-level applications. Hence, such applications tend to be closely tied to one particular kernel. With the added support for the L4ka::Pistachio kernel as base platform for Genode, it has now become possible to develop applications and services that are equally executable on Linux, the L4/Fiasco kernel, and the L4ka::Pistachio kernel without any modifications.
In addition to extending the range of supported kernel platforms, the current release enhances Genode's functionality by wide margins. In particular, we introduced a device driver environment for executing Linux-2.6 device drivers on Genode, added basic networking support, and made the Qt4 application framework natively available on Genode.
Read on about the new features described in the release notes...
Download the release 9.02 of the Genode OS Framework...
Embedded World 2009
Thanks to the kind support of Trenz Electronic, we have the opportunity to present our company as co-exhibitors at the Embedded World 2009 exhibition. We will focus our presentation on our FPGA-based GUI technology (Genode FX). If you like to meet us in person or see Genode FX in action, we invite you to visit us:
March 03-05, 2009
hall 12, booth 12-536.
Dissertation on Securing Graphical User Interfaces
Norman Feske's dissertation on "Securing Graphical User Interfaces" attempts to resolve the apparent conflict between different design goals of GUI architectures namely security, compatibility, performance, and quality of service. The thesis comprises the outcome of various extensive practical experiments conducted while working on the DOpE and Nitpicker GUI servers. After incorporating the reviewer's feedback, the full text of the thesis will be made publicly available.
Genode OS Framework version 8.11 released
The version 8.11 of Genode addresses two crucial requirements for the practical use of the framework, the availability of device drivers and a way to enable existing C code bases to be ported to Genode. Our new device-driver API called DDE kit allows for the reuse of existing C-written device drivers at low engineering costs. For facilitating the porting of the wealth of existing open-source libraries to Genode, we have complemented the base framework with a C runtime ported from FreeBSD. Among the numerous other changes and additions described in our detailed release notes are a new API for asynchronous notifications, the consistent typification of capabilities, and a new experimental feature called managed dataspaces.
Learn more about all the new features and changes described in our comprehensive release notes...
Download the release 8.11 of the Genode OS Framework...
Live-CD image demonstrating Genode
In preparation of the upcoming Genode source-code release 8.11, we have made our default demonstration scenario available as bootable CD image. So for just trying out Genode, you won't need to touch any source code. This version runs on Qemu, VirtualBox, or PC hardware. Download the ISO image at Genode project website...
Genode FX on Virtex-4 FPGAs
Our detailed porting guide will enable third parties to deploy our technology on custom FPGA boards in a straight-forward way. The guide takes the popular ML405 evaluation platform as example but the described methodology should be easily applicable to other boards as well. In addition to the ML405, we have added new example projects for the Spartan-3E and Spartan-3AN platforms to our public subversion repository. For your convenience, we have compiled the Genode FX release 2008-10. Visit the Genode FX product page...
Newsletter archive online
As we have published our second newsletter today, it is time to start archiving these mailings. If you are not receiving our newsletter on a regular basis via email, you can now read the past newsletters online at our newsletter archive.
Genode FX running on PowerPC of Xilinx Virtex 5 FPGAs
The Virtex5 series marks the high end of FPGA products from Xilinx. The Virtex5 FPGA featured on the ML507 board provides a full PowerPC 440 core. With the release 2008-09, Genode FX supports the ML507 board. Applications developed for Genode FX can now be compiled for the Microblaze architecture and the PowerPC without source-code modifications. The ML507 demo project that comes with the official release operates the PowerPC at 300MHz and uses the DVI connector for video output at a resolution of 1024x768.
Genode FPGA graphics project launched
Just three week after the launch of the Genode OS Framework, we have released our second major asset as an open-source project. Genode FX is a composition of hardware and software that enables the creation of fully fledged graphical user interfaces as system-on-chip solutions using commodity FPGAs, e.g., Xilinx' low-cost Spartan3 series. The integrated solution complements the Microblaze soft core with custom hardware for interconnecting display and input devices. On the software side, the heart of the project is a complete GUI software stack especially tailored to resource-constrained embedded systems. In addition to leveraging the Microblaze architecture, support for the PPC core as featured in high-end Virtex5 FPGAs is on the way. This prospect makes Genode FX a solution that scales with the demands of current and future applications. The release features a complete demonstration project ready to use with widely popular Spartan3A Starter Kit boards. Learn more about Genode FX...
Genode Labs on the web
To our delight, the initial release of the Genode OS Framework two weeks ago helped to spawn public interest in our project and our company. Genode Labs was featured on the front pages of TU Dresden's department of computer science, OS News, Heise Online, and the Saxxess IT Portal.
Genode OS Framework version 8.08 released
After intense preparation work during the past weeks, we released the first official version of the Genode OS Framework. This version contains all base components, services, and device drivers to execute a provided interactive demonstration scenario on both Linux via libSDL and bare PC hardware via the L4/Fiasco microkernel and our custom device drivers. Visit genode.org to learn more about the Genode project and download the latest release...
Launch of the genode.org project website
Until today, the official information about our operating system project called Genode was rather sparse. With genode.org, we have now created a central place on the web with all information and resources available around Genode. There you can find the latest news about the progress of the project, documentation, tutorials, a community-maintained wiki, mailing lists, and much more. The website represents a shift away from our past group-internal mode of development towards Genode as an open-source community project. We hope, the website will help us to foster a vivid and healty development community that connects well with other open-source projects. The first official release of the Genode OS framework is planned for the 6th of August. Visit the genode.org project website...
Thanks for your feedback
Since we launched the first version of this website two weeks ago, we received a lot of feedback. Thanks to all of you who provided us with helpful suggestions! Some of you noticed the slightly irritating frame-based redirection, which we used as an interim solution while the domain-name transfer of genode-labs.com was pending. Now that the domain-name transfer is completed, you can actually bookmark individual locations of the website and receive our RSS feed from the following non-cryptic address: http://genode-labs.com/news/news/RSS
Company website launched
With our new website, we provide a central place with all information regarding the business of Genode Labs and our projects. Currently, the details about our products and services are rather sparse. In the following weeks, we will successively extend the website with more in-depth coverage about our projects. In addition, you can expect us to launch a dedicated project website for the Genode OS Framework in July.
To get the latest news about us and our products, we recommend you to subscribe to our newsletter, which will be delivered at a low rate of one email every one or two months. Subscribe to the Genode Labs newsletter...
Moving into our new working environment
While seeking affordable office space in various parts of Dresden, we came across the Bonhoff Unternehmer Zentrum, which is a private foundation focused on supporting startup companies. Their nice office building in Dresden-Löbtau provides us a nice and affordable place to work. In case you want to visit us, our address is: Genode Labs, Tharandter Str. 13, 01159 Dresden, Germany. Visit our office building via Google Maps...
Genode Labs founded
Our company named Genode Labs has now started to exist. Because of our chosen legal form, its official name wears the additional information "Feske & Helmuth Systementwicklung GbR". After moving into our new office space, our first action will be the official release of our existing software, scheduled for the begin of July. This initial release will be accompanied by the launch of dedicated project website that will aggregate all information about the Genode OS Framework and invite developers to participate. Beside preparing this release, our natural focus during the initial phase of the company is the acquisition of new projects. We look forward to see how the official launch of the project website will stimulate the interest in collaboration with us.
