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.

Genode OS Framework release 24.02 Feb 29, 2024

Version 24.02 revisits Genode's audio support for latency-sensitive scenarios, flexible sample rates, and pluggable drivers. It also introduces the new ability of the Goa SDK to use Sculpt OS as remote test target, comes with a new TCP/IP stack based on Linux 6.1.20, makes drivers aware of suspend/resume, and improves HID event handling.

Genode 24.02 kicks off the year with a profound redesign of the framework's audio infrastructure, addressing the routing and mixing of multi-channel audio streams at flexible sample rates, the dynamic starting and removal of audio sources and sinks, and latency optimization.

Besides audio, the second infrastructural rework is a new TCP/IP stack based on DDE-Linux 6.1.20. It wraps up our long-year transition from a fairly fragmented landscape of ported driver code to the consistent use of our modern Linux device-driver environment across all Linux-based drivers and protocol stacks.

The feature highlight of the release is the new ability of using Sculpt OS as a remote test target for the Goa SDK during application development. Thanks to this new feature, Genode applications can be developed and tested in a quick and uniform way, whether testing directly on a Linux-based development environment, or on a Sculpt PC reachable via a local network, or a PinePhone connected to the same wireless access point.

Further highlights of the release are the versatile handling of human-interface devices including the calibration of motion events, the use of Vivante GPUs by multiple clients, and the driver-related preparatory steps needed for implementing suspend/resume for Sculpt OS.

You can find the changes presented in full detail in the release documentation of version 24.02...

Road Map for 2024 Jan 18, 2024

After intensively concentrating on deeply technical topics below the surface in 2023, we are going to reap user-visible rewards in 2024 by focussing on Sculpt OS usability.

Thanks to the input gathered from our annual road-map discussion on Genode's mailing list, we have updated the project road map for 2024.

Without hesitation, our developer community quickly rallied behind the topic "Sculpt OS usability", desiring to boost the user experience with respect to multi-monitor usage, convenient interactive UIs for common tasks, profound support for touchpads and touchscreens, tearing-free graphics, low-latency audio, casual on-target debugging, and suspend/resume.

The focus on usability notwithstanding, we will steadily continue with the gardening of Genode's driver landscape, fostering the consistent use of drivers ported from up-to-date Linux kernels, clear-cut ACPI support, and making drivers pluggable. In 2024, we will also promote Genode's custom (base-hw) microkernel to become the default kernel for Sculpt OS, which is the culmination of a multi-year effort.

Please find our reflection of the past year and the complete plan for 2024 presented on Genode's official road-map page.