September 2008
newsletter_september_2008.txt
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======================================= Genode Labs Newsletter - September 2008 ======================================= Content 1. Responses to the initial release of the Genode OS Framework 2. Genode FPGA Graphics project launched 3. Preview of the Genode OS Framework release 8.11 4. New challenges ahead 1. Responses to the initial release of the Genode OS Framework -------------------------------------------------------------- The release of the Genode OS Framework in August has drawn the attention of several online news websites including OS News, a website focused on operating-system technology http://osnews.com/story/20169/Genode_OS_Framework_8_08_Released Heise online, a very popular German IT news ticker http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Genode-Sichere-Betriebssysteme-aus-Dresden--/meldung/114420 The front page of computer-science department of TU Dresden http://www.inf.tu-dresden.de/article.php?node_id=1&ln=en&article_id=201 Saxxess, an IT portal for Saxony http://www.saxxess.com/content/15776.htm Thanks to this coverage, the Genode OS Framework has become visible to other open-source projects. In particular, we were delighted to see Genode being picked up and incorporated into the Syllable Server OS project. It is now part of the official distribution of Syllable Server 0.3 as released on 12th of August: http://development.syllable.org/pages/index.html We look forward exploring the synergies of both projects! 2. Genode FPGA Graphics project launched ---------------------------------------- Only three weeks after having released the Genode OS Framework, we have made our second major project publicly available. The Genode FPGA Graphics (Genode FX) project is a composition of hardware and software components that enable the creation of fully fledged graphical user interfaces as system-on-chip solutions using commodity FPGAs. The approach relies on a GUI software stack executed on a soft core CPU implementation (e.g., Microblaze) or on a hard wired CPU (e.g., PPC core as featured by Virtex4 FPGAs). For interfacing input devices and the display to the system, the CPU core is complemented by custom peripheral components. Since 2005, this project was conducted by Matthias Alles and Norman Feske. With our official release in August 2008, we turned this project into an open-source community project. At release time, Genode FX supported the Spartan3A Starter kit. Thanks to Matthias Alles' steady improvements, we were able to announce the support for the ML507 Virtex5-based platform at the beginning of September. Genode FX supports now Xilinx FPGAs ranging from the low-cost Spartan3 series using the Microblaze soft core up to the high-end Virtex5 series using the PowerPC 440. Video output is supported for screen resolutions up to 1024x768 via VGA or DVI. More detailed information on Genode FX are available at our product page http://genode-labs.com/products/fpga-graphics You can find our community resources such as source code, news, and mailing lists at our Sourceforge site: https://sourceforge.net/projects/genode-fx/ 3. Preview of the Genode OS Framework release 8.11 -------------------------------------------------- The development of the Genode OS Framework steadily progresses towards the upcoming release 8.11. The highlights for this release will be - Type safety of capabilities on the C++ language level, which vastly improves the safety and simplicity of code - Support for asynchronous notifications in the base API, which is prerequisite for a number of planned additional features such as nested data spaces - Device driver infrastructure for the reuse of Linux device drivers - C library, which will facilitate the porting of existing software and clear the way towards creating a POSIX environment on Genode 4. New challenges ahead ----------------------- Because we believe that the Genode OS Framework provides a lot of opportunity for research and experimentation, we invite academic and research institutions to join our effort. On our Wiki, have compiled a number of challenges that we find interesting to pursue, for example exploring Linux process containers, running Genode on FPGA platforms, dynamic linking support, de-privileging VESA, optimizing locking performance, and the port of libSDL. We hope that this compilation inspires researchers, students, and individuals to pick up our ideas and start experimenting with Genode. More details about our future challenges are described in our Wiki: http://genode.org/community/wiki/Challenges 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 ยท http://genode.org
