December 2009/January 2010

File contents

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Genode Labs Newsletter - Dezember/Januar 2010
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Content

1. Genode Labs leaves behind its infancy
2. Exploring the NOVA hypervisor
3. Upcoming release of the Genode OS Framework 10.02


1. 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.


2. Exploring the NOVA hypervisor
--------------------------------

The Genode OS Framework is a user-level toolkit for building
specialized operating systems using microkernel technology. When
we started its development in 2006 at the OS Group of the
University of Technology Dresden, it was originally designated to
be the user land of a next-generation and to-be-developed new
kernel called NOVA. Because the kernel was not ready at that
time, we had to rely on intermediate solutions as kernel platform
such as Fiasco and Linux during development. These circumstances
led us the extremely portable design that Genode has today and
motivated us to make Genode available on the whole family of L4
microkernels including Fiasco, L4ka::Pistachio, and OKL4.

In December, the day we waited for a long time had come. The
first version of NOVA was publicly released:

  http://hypervisor.org

Besides the novel and modern kernel interface, NOVA has a list
of features that sets it apart from most other microkernels, in
particular support for virtualization hardware, multi-processor
support, and capability-based security. At Genode Labs, we are
currently investigating how to make Genode available on this
kernel as a benefit for both, the NOVA developers and the Genode
community.


3. Upcoming release of the Genode OS Framework 10.02
----------------------------------------------------

According to our updated road map for 2010

  http://genode.org/about/road-map

we are in the process of preparing the upcoming version 10.02
scheduled for the end of February. With this release, we aim to
broaden the base-platform support, in particular the support
for the ARM CPU architecture. Furthermore, we will introduce
long desired functionality such as real-time priorities, Python
scripting, and a plugin concept for the C runtime (for using
networking and files).


About the newsletter
--------------------

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Best regards
-- 
Norman Feske
Genode Labs

http://www.genode-labs.com/ · http://genode.org/