Genode OS Framework release 14.08 Aug 28, 2014

The central theme of version 14.08 is a new GUI architecture that maintains strong security yet scales to highly flexible and dynamic GUIs. Furthermore, the release comes with a port of OpenVPN, networking support for VirtualBox, updated DDE Linux, and vastly improved performance of our custom base-hw kernel.

The new GUI architecture introduced with the release puts security in the front seat while aiming at highly customizable user experiences. In line with Genode's philosophy, it does not come as a complete solution with a fixed feature set but as a number of building blocks. Its flexibility stems from the many different ways of how those building blocks can be combined. Because each component uses well-defined interfaces, it becomes easy to customize the look&feel and the behaviour of the user interface by replacing individual components by alternative implementations.

Further highlights in addition to the GUI-related improvements are the added support for networking in VirtualBox, multi-processor support for the Seoul virtual machine monitor, pluggable file systems, and the added port of OpenVPN. Many existing parts of the framework received attention as well. For example, the environment for executing Linux device drivers (DDE Linux) on top of Genode has been updated to Linux 3.14.5, we improved the integration of Qt5, and the performance of our custom kernel for ARM hardware got a boost.

More background information about all the new features and improvements is provided in the release documentation of version 14.08...