Sculpt OS release 24.04 Apr 26, 2024

Sculpt OS 24.04 is rich of new user-visible features. It now supports 4K displays and I2C touchpads out of the box, brings experimental support for suspend/resume, allows the fine-grained assignment of USB devices to applications and VMs, and introduces new audio-mixing capabilities.

The release of version 24.04 adheres to our declared focus on Sculpt OS usability during this year. Seasoned users will immediately recognize the new power of the component-management UI, offering easy control over optional features, software providers, and software installation. Among many little user-interface improvements, the component graph and configuration interface have become scrollable, boosting the interactive user experience.

When looking closely at the components, users will recognize a whole new set of drivers neatly grouped under hardware. In contrast to earlier versions, which operated these drivers hidden from the user, the new version manages the drivers dynamically and fully transparent for the user. The change makes the user interface more logical and simpler. However, the driving force behind this approach was our aspired support for suspend/resume, which requires the dynamic life-cycle management of drivers. This brings us to the technical highlight of the release: After on-and-off development for more than a year, we are more than happy offering suspend/resume as an experimental feature.

As culmination of a second long-term development, version 24.04 employs a new and much more flexible interplay between the USB-host driver and components accessing USB devices. The dynamic assignment of devices to virtual machines and other components has become a breeze.

Just in time for the release, Sculpt OS has received a completely overhauled audio stack that supports pluggable drivers, arbitrary sample rates, and the flexible routing and mixing of audio signals. We are eager to stress and refine the taken approach over the upcoming release cycle to make low-latency audio a commodity on Sculpt OS.

Thanks to our routine with running Sculpt OS on modern laptops day to day, version 24.04 bumps the range of supported hardware. Displays up to 4K are supported out of the box now, and touchpads of laptops like the Gen13 Framework have become operational.

Speaking of developers, the release offers two bold new features targeted at this specific demography, namely the support for on-target debugging via GDB, and the ability to use Sculpt OS as a remote test target of Genode's Goa SDK. Look out for more information about these features in the upcoming weeks at https://genodians.org.

Sculpt OS 24.04 is available as ready-to-use system image at the Sculpt download page accompanied with updated documentation.