Genode OS Framework release 11.05 May 26, 2011

The Genode version 11.05 advances the Fiasco.OC platform support to the same level as the other fully-featured base platforms, enables the use of L4Linux with Genode, and introduces a brand new API for inter-process procedure calls.

Fiasco.OC is a modern microkernel developed at the OS Group of the University of Technology Dresden. It is highly regarded for two reasons, its comprehensive support for different CPU architectures and the user-level variant of the Linux kernel called L4Linux. Now, those advantages have become available to the users of Genode. Thereby, new usage scenarios can be realized by combining the L4Linux virtualization solution with Genode's rich set of components such as Qt4, lwIP, and a growing number of device drivers.

Our custom kernel implementation for MicroBlaze-based SoCs has undergone a major upgrade to enable the implementation of user-level device drivers. To make this platform easy to explore, the release is accompanied with a reference SoC that is ready-to-use on the Xilinx Spartan3A Starter Kit.

The most significant API-related change of the framework is a brand new API for implementing remote procedure calls across process boundaries. The new RPC API takes our experience during last 5 years of Genode development into consideration and alleviates long standing shortcomings of the original inter-process communication API.

To pave the way towards the use of Genode for productive use, we have started to explore ways to make standard debugging solutions available to Genode. Our new GDB monitor implementation speaks the GDB protocol over TCP/IP and thereby enables the GNU debugger to inspect a user-level Genode process via a remote connection.

Read the complete story about these and many more changes in the release notes of version 11.05...