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Genode Labs Newsletter - August 2008
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This is the first Genode-Labs newsletter. Thanks for your interest
in our newly founded company and the projects we pursue. 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
Content
1. Company founded at 15th of May
2. Launch of our project website for the Genode OS Framework
3. Release of the Genode OS Framework version 8.08
4. Road Map
1. Genode Labs started to exist
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The planning of founding our company started in spring 2007 when we
(Christian Helmuth and Norman Feske) finished the preliminary
elaboration on our new OS architecture. Our excitement about the
results and the feedback we received from 3rd parties stimulated our
ambition to advance this technology as an independent company.
We wanted clear the way for the practical application of our
solution for solving real-world problems.
In addition to our research job at the university, we started the
preparation of our spin-off in mid 2007. These preparations included
the negotiation about the use of the IP that we created as university
staff members, educating us about law and economics, creating a
business concept, and finding a suitable office. Our general business
approach is to start small, learn how to do business and get profitable
at a small scale, and then grow organically.
With the formal start of our company Genode Labs at the 15th of May,
we entered the second phase of life of our company with the goal to
become fully operational. One corner stone for achieving this goal
is our company website:
http://www.genode-labs.com
There, you can find the profile of our offered services and an overview
about the technologies that we are striving to turn into products.
Our profile is focused on two main areas of competence:
1. Genode OS Framework, which is the reference implementation
of our custom OS architecture. With its novel organizational
approach, our architecture is able to align highly dynamic
workloads with robustness, security, and low complexity.
You can find a general overview about Genode here:
http://genode.org/documentation/general-overview
2. Customized graphical user interfaces, built upon our rich
pool of GUI implementations including widget sets, window
management, graphics drivers, and low-level rendering.
An overview about the foundation of our graphics-related
work including screenshots is available here:
http://www.genode-labs.com/products/graphical-user-interfaces
Today, we enter the third phase of our company, which aims at
becoming independent from the funding that we receive from the
german state. Hence, our current main focus is the acquisition of
projects. These projects do not necessarily need to relate to
our above mentioned core competencies. More generally, we are
willing to work on projects about system software, application
development, and web development:
http://www.genode-labs.com/services
If you think, we could be of value for a project of yours, please
do not hesitate to contact us.
2. Project website for the Genode OS Framework
----------------------------------------------
On 29th of July, we launched the project website for the Genode OS Framework.
Our intension behind this website is to motivate individuals, companies, and
researchers to join our effort to advance Genode as an open-source community
project. To spawn the interest of potential developers, we focused our
work on creating architectural and technical documentation. You can see
the result at
http://genode.org
Furthermore, we compiled a web page that lists interesting challenges and
opportunities for further development. We plan to extend this collection
on a regular basis.
http://genode.org/community/wiki/Challenges
3. Release of the Genode OS Framework version 8.08
--------------------------------------------------
Shortly after launching the Genode project website, we released the first
public version of the full source code of the Genode OS Framework. For
naming our versions, we use the Ubuntu version-naming scheme, which takes
the current year as major number and the month as minor number. Hence,
this version is called 8.08. You can find the release notes and the
download link at the download section of genode.org:
http://genode.org/download/latest-release
4. Road map and horizon
-----------------------
With the release of the Genode OS Framework 8.08, we reached our first
milestone of this project and our company. The next release is scheduled
for November. For the upcoming release, we plan the incremental extension
of the base API, a device-driver framework, and a C runtime environment.
In addition to our work at Genode Labs, there are two very interesting
developments conducted as research studies at TU Dresden. Julian
Stecklina ported the predecessor of the Genode OS Framework to the
L4/Pistachio microkernel and he plans to make his work available to
our project soon. We are very happy about Julian joining our community.
Furthermore, Christian Prochaska ported Qt4 on top Genode and he was
able to demonstrate his work on both the Linux version and the L4/Fiasco
version. We are excited to see a development framework as complex as
Qt4 to be executable on our platform.
Best regards
--
Norman Feske
Genode Labs
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