Genode OS Framework release 13.08 Aug 15, 2013

We celebrate our 5th anniversary with the addition of three major features: Qt5 on all kernels, profound multi-processor support on the NOVA and Fiasco.OC kernels, and light-weight tracing of inter-process communication.

The availability of Qt has always been one of the features that made our framework attractive to the microkernel community. We have closely followed the development of Qt5 and greatly appreciate the direction the Qt developers are heading to. Now that Qt5 has reached a stable state, the time is right for Genode to make the switch from Qt4 to Qt5. With the fresh port of Qt version 5.1 to Genode, Qt becomes available on the entirety of kernels supported by the framework.

Component-based systems use to pose the difficulty of getting a holistic view on the system. The more complex the system scenarios become, the more inter-component communication takes place. Finding performance bottlenecks in such kinds of de-componentized systems tends to be much more challenging than in the world of monolithic systems. To overcome this challenge, the new version comes with tracing support deeply built into the framework. This facility is able to capture the interactions of Genode components between each other in a light-weight fashion with almost no side effects.

As the third major addition, version 13.08 comes with substantial support for multi-processor systems, in particular for using Genode with the NOVA kernel. Within the NOVA developer community, this controversial topic has been discussed for several years. It seemed like NOVA's multi-processor model was inherently contradicting with the design of the Genode API. However, we have finally found a fairly elegant solution that makes multiple CPUs seamlessly available for Genode users on NOVA.

Besides these highlights, the release comes with new SATA 3.0 and power-management drivers for the Samsung Exynos-5 SoC, updates the Fiasco.OC kernel and L4Linux, and introduces measures for verifying the integrity of downloaded 3rd-party source codes.

Those and many more topics are presented in detail in the release documentation of version 13.08...