=======================================
 Genode Labs Newsletter - April/May 2011
 =======================================

 Content

 1. Co-developer of Genode FX spawns new startup company
 2. Genode OS developer community on the rise
 3. Version 11.05 of the Genode OS Framework


 1. Co-developer of Genode FX spawns new startup company
 -------------------------------------------------------

 Our longtime friend and co-developer of the Genode FPGA Graphics
 Project Matthias Alles has founded his own company called Creonic
 together with his partner Timo Lehnigk-Emden. Both have an impressive
 track record for developing IP cores in the field of communication
 systems at the University of Kaiserslautern and founded their company
 with the vision to transfer their scientific results to real-world
 products. In May, the Creonic website went online:

   http://creonic.com

 We at Genode Labs feel closely connected to Creonic because both
 companies share a very similar founding story. Driven by the utmost
 dedication for pushing technology forward in a self-determined way
 combined with enthusiasm for high-quality engineering, both companies
 were started with the premises of self funding and organic growth. We
 congratulate the founders of Creonic on having successfully launched
 their company and look forward to a fruitful partnership between
 Creonic and Genode Labs for the many years of business to come.


 2. Genode OS developer community on the rise
 ---------------------------------------------

 Since the very first Open-Source release in summer 2008, we envisioned
 the Genode OS Framework to become a community-driven project used by
 creative individuals, companies, and students as a platform to conduct
 new ideas in OS research. We had to learn that communities do not grow
 over night. Instead, getting people interested in our technology has
 been a long-winded process. Now, we experience that our patience is
 getting rewarded by several new people joining the Genode developer
 community since the beginning of 2011. We are especially delighted
 about having become acquainted with the Systems Research Group of
 Samsung (SISA) that shares our far-reaching vision of the future of
 operating systems. We are grateful to this group for having supported
 the development of several new features as found in the latest Genode
 OS release through funding and advice. Welcome to the Genode OS
 developer community!


 3. Version 11.05 of the Genode OS Framework
 -------------------------------------------

 In line with our three-months release cycle, we have published the
 version 11.05 of the Genode OS Framework. With this version, we
 pursued two goals, revisiting the framework's mechanisms inter-process
 communication and advancing the support for the base platforms that
 we introduced in February.

 The reliance on inter-process communication is the most fundamental
 characteristic of microkernel-based operating systems. Because Genode
 is based on a microkernel-based architecture, we consider an
 efficient, robust, and easy-to-use programming interface for
 inter-process communication as crucial for the success of the Genode
 OS technology. When the Genode project was started in 2006, we
 dismissed the time-tested solutions of the day in favor of an original
 approach called dynamic RPC marshalling. Even though our custom
 solution served us well over the last five years, it had its own share
 of limitations and deficiencies, most importantly the lack of type
 safety and the need for manual maintenance of communication code. Now,
 we have taken the chance to create a new framework API that takes our
 long-year experience into full account and thereby resolves all of the
 known limitations of Genode's inter-process communication facility.

 In February, we introduced the Fiasco.OC kernel as well as a custom
 kernel for the MicroBlaze architecture as new base platforms. These
 new platforms received a lot of attention. We are happy to report
 that the Fiasco.OC base platform has become capable of executing the
 entire Genode software stack including the dynamic linker, Qt4, lwIP,
 and the steadily growing number of device drivers. Furthermore, we
 have made the classical workload of Fiasco.OC, namely L4Linux,
 available on Genode.

 For the complete story with further news such as experimental support
 for GDB, and ARM RealView device drivers, please have a look at our
 full release-notes documentation:

   http://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/11.05


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 --------------------

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 Best regards
 -- 
 Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
 Genode Labs

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

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