Technical articles about the Genode OS Framework

Sculpt OS

Sculpt is the Genode-based general-purpose operating system daily used by the Genode developers. The top-most version the most recent one.

Sculpt Operating System 23.10

(printable version)

Previous versions

23.04 (PDF), 22.10 (PDF), 22.04 (PDF), 21.10 (PDF), 21.03 (PDF), 20.08 (PDF), 20.02 (PDF), 19.07 (PDF)

Sculpt as a Community Experience

The article (also available as printable version) documents the fourth version that is focused on the federated provisioning of software while giving the user full control over the component deployment via a graphical user interface.

Sculpt with Visual Composition

The article (also available as printable version) documents the third version, introducing an interactive runtime view for visualizing the relationship between components, and for adding and removing components.

Sculpt for The Curious

The article (also available as printable version) documents the second version, introducing a graphical user interface and the automation of fundamental work flows.

Sculpt for Early Adopters

The article (also available as printable version) describes the first published version. It covers everything needed to get it running on a real machine, including disk preparation, wireless networking, storage, software installation and deployment, and virtualization.

Dual licensing of 3rd-party Genode components

Since founded in 2008, Genode Labs funds the Genode project based on a dual-licensing business model, which is enabled by the combination of the AGPLv3 as a strong copyleft license with the library-like nature of the framework. To foster a sustainable ecosystem around Genode, we wish to enable others to pursue a similar business model while maintaining the spirit of open collaboration and free software.

We eventually crafted a new license called "Genode Component Public License" (Genode CPL) specifically for components developed by 3rd parties, outside of Genode Labs. The article provides the rationale, license text, and FAQ of this software license.

How Genode came to RISC-V

The experience report gives in-depth technical information about the steps taken to port Genode to the RISC-V hardware architecture.

The story behind Genode's TrustZone demo on the USB Armory

The article provides a look behind the scenes of developing the Genode support for the USB Armory platform.

An in-depth look into the ARM virtualization extensions

The article explores the mechanisms of the ARM virtualization extensions and describes how Genode's custom base-hw kernel was turned into a microhypervisor.

Genode on seL4

A series of articles that describes the line of work to run Genode-based systems on top of the seL4 kernel.

Building a simple root task from scratch

The first article describes the integration of the kernel code with Genode's source tree and the steps taken to create a minimalistic root task that runs on the kernel. It is full of hands-on information about the methodology of such a porting effort and describes the experience with using the kernel from the perspective of someone with no prior association with the seL4 project.

IPC and virtual memory

The second part of the article series examines the seL4 kernel interface with respect to synchronous inter-process communication and the management of virtual memory.

Porting the core component

The third article presents the steps taken to bring Genode's core and init components to life. Among the covered topics are the memory and capability management, inter-component communication, and page-fault handling. The article closes with a state of development that principally enables simple Genode scenarios to run on the seL4 kernel.

An Exploration of ARM TrustZone Technology

The article summarizes our experience with investigating ARM TrustZone and building prototypes using this technology. It is supplemented by a video demonstrating TrustZone on an i.MX53 SABRE tablet.

How Genode came to the Pandaboard

The experience report gives insights into the steps taken to enable and optimize the Genode OS Framework on the OMAP4-based Pandaboard.

Bringing Genode to the OKL4 kernel

This article describes the process of porting the Genode OS Framework to the OKL4 kernel version 2.1.