Genode OS Framework release 17.08 Aug 30, 2017

Version 17.08 enables hardware-accelerated graphics on Intel-Gen8 GPUs and expands Genode's seL4-kernel support to the ARM and 64-bit x86 architectures. Further topics are UEFI boot, VFS enhancements such as a new FatFS plugin, and the use of Genode as Xen DomU.

The new release bears the fruit of our long-term investigation of hardware-accelerated graphics on modern Intel platforms that we conducted over the past year. The result is a brand new low-complexity GPU multiplexer that is designed after microkernel principles. With far less than 10K lines of code, it paves the ground for leveraging the power of GPUs at an extremely tiny footprint on the trusted computing base. The GPU multiplexer is accompanied with the matching application-side library infrastructure such as Mesa, libdrm, Qt5 bindings, SDL bindings. This allows Genode components to use the GPU with standard APIs like OpenGL.

The seL4 microkernel is becoming more and more popular. Since about one year, most Genode scenarios are able to use this kernel on the 32-bit x86 architecture. The growing interest in the combination of seL4 with Genode prompted us to expand the architecture support to ARM and 64-bit x86 now. Additionally, we enabled SMP on x86, priority support, and Genode's CPU-time monitoring facility on this kernel.

Speaking of Genode's underlying kernels, the current release equips NOVA, seL4, and our custom base-hw kernel with UEFI-boot support. It updates the Muen separation kernel to a current version, and adds the ability to run Genode as Xen DomU domains.

These and the many more topics of the new version are covered by the release documentation of version 17.08...