Sculpt OS release 21.03 Mar 24, 2021

Version 21.03 of the Sculpt operating system makes the system resilient against classes of driver failures, adds configurable real-time priorities, and introduces interfaces for screen capturing and user-event injection.

Sculpt OS 21.03 incorporates the many improvements of the latest two Genode releases. Thanks to Genode's concept of pluggable device drivers, the system has reached a new level of robustness against malfunctioning drivers. For example, if the Intel graphics driver trips over an unsupported external display, the driver gets automatically restarted while all graphical applications keep running. Or as another example, should the overly complex Wifi driver have a hick-up, it can be restarted with a simple mouse click without harming the networking stacks running on top.

Even though Genode supports static-priority scheduling since more than a decade, Sculpt did not make this feature available to end users so far. The new version changes that. For each component, the user can now take a deliberate decision about the hard scheduling priority, e.g., prioritizing latency-critical multi-media applications over computational workloads or virtual machines.

Speaking of workloads, to push the limits of what is possible with Sculpt OS, the new version introduces additional interfaces that can be assigned to components. First, it has become possible to redirect the interaction of a component with the kernel through another component, thereby enabling features like dynamic CPU-load balancing to be implemented as plain user-level services. Second, there are new interfaces for capturing the screen and for injecting input events. The latter interfaces pave the ground for virtual keyboards, screen-sharing application, or remote administration scenarios.

Under the hood, there are plenty of improvements that make the life of Sculpt users better. The keyboard layout can now be picked from a menu. The Chromium-based Falkon web browser runs circles around the previous version. Menu items and file lists appear nicely sorted. Terminal windows immediately respond to global font-size changes. On modern Intel machines, Sculpt leverages Intel Hardware P-states (HWP) for power and thermal management now. You can find an illustrated tour of these and more changes in a dedicated article at Genodians.org.

The updated manual goes into detail about the use of the new system.

The ready-to-use system image for version 21.03 is available at the Sculpt download page.