April/May 2009
newsletter-2009-05.txt
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======================================= Genode Labs Newsletter - April/May 2009 ======================================= Content 1. Welcoming new members of Genode Labs 2. Paper about the Genode FPGA Graphics Project 3. Bringing the Genode OS Framework to OKL4 4. Genode OS Framework release 9.05 1. Welcoming new members of Genode Labs --------------------------------------- We are very happy to welcome Christian Prochaska, Stefan Kalkowski, and Sebastian Sumpf as new members of the Genode Labs staff. In the past, Christian created the Genode port of Qt4 and contributed his work to our project. As member of Genode Labs, he will continue his efforts to advance Genode to a generally usable operating system. Stefan and Sebastian are former staff members of the TUD:OS group and gained long-year practical experience with microkernel-based system architectures. Because both had been extremely supportive for Genode in the past, it is pleasure for us to team up with them. We are looking forward to shape the future of Genode Labs together. 2. Paper about the Genode FPGA Graphics Project published --------------------------------------------------------- The Genode FPGA Graphics project (Genode FX) has gained steadily growing interest since the first release in autumn 2008. We are particularly happy to see academic and research institutions picking up the open-source version of this project. Until now, however, technical background information about Genode FX was rather sparse. We have now published the following paper to fill this gap: Norman Feske and Matthias Alles: "Genode FX: an FPGA-based GUI with Bounded Output Latency and Guaranteed Responsiveness to User Input" (Technical Report, Genode Labs, May 2009) http://genode-labs.com/publications/genode-fpga-graphics-2009.pdf "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 16-bit 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." On 14th of May, we presented Genode FX at the 10. Workshop Mikro- controller-Applikation in Mittweida. The following German summary of our paper appeared in the accompanying proceedings: Norman Feske: "Genode FX: eine FPGA-basierte grafische Benutzerschnittstelle" (10. Workshop Mikrocontroller-Applikation, Mittweida 14. Mai 2009) http://genode-labs.com/publications/genode-fpga-graphics-abstract-de-2009.pdf 3. Bringing the Genode OS Framework to OKL4 ------------------------------------------- With the ongoing development of the Genode OS Framework, we pursue the goal to establish a unified programming environment for building applications, protocol stacks, and device drivers that are portable among different microkernel-based systems. We hope that a common ground will motivate the various existing microkernel communities to unite their efforts. From our perspective, the OKL4 community is one of the most important ones in the world of L4 microkernels. We appreciate the their cutting-edge efforts for building a formally verified kernel and regard the commercial success of Open Kernel Labs as a huge leap for the L4 community as a whole. Also from a technical perspective, the OKL4 kernel is intriguing as a base platform for Genode. Of all kernels supported so far, OKL4's kernel interface fits best with Genode, and with its recent versions, OKL4 has evolved to a capability-based kernel. Furthermore, there exists a user-level variant of Linux running on top of OKL4, which is attractive for us as well. We have now made Genode available on the OKL4 kernel. Even though not all Genode features are supported on this new platform yet, the complete demonstration scenario including user-level device drivers and the Nitpicker GUI are running with OKL4 version 2.1 on plain PC hardware. For those interested in learning more about the inner workings of Genode and the specialities of the OKL4 base platform, we have documented our work in the following article: http://genode.org/documentation/articles/genode-on-okl4 4. Genode OS Framework release 9.05 ----------------------------------- On 27th of May, we released the version 9.05 of the Genode OS Framework. The most important features are * Support for the OKL4 kernel as base platform * Integration the Qt4 application framework into the mainline source tree and bumped the version to 4.5.1. * The first parts of our USB stack including host-controller drivers (UHCI, OHCI, and EHCI) and a human-interface device (HID) driver * Support for 64-bit Linux as base platform All the new features and changes are described in our detailed release notes: http://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/9.05 We have also updated our road map for the upcoming releases. The next release will be focused on refinements and optimizations such as support for shared libraries, and the decomposition of the network and USB stacks. Towards the end of the year, we aim to be able to host unmodified POSIX applications executed within one or multiple lightweight POSIX execution environments as Genode sub systems. You can revisit our updated road map here: http://genode.org/about/road-map 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 -- Norman Feske Genode Labs http://www.genode-labs.com · http://genode.org
