Genode OS Framework release 15.02 Feb 27, 2015

Version 15.02 extends the base-hw kernel with ARM-virtualization support, introduces a highly modularized tool kit for automated testing, adds support for the USB Armory platform, and improves the performance and stability of VirtualBox on Genode/NOVA.

Most of the previous releases were motivated by our desire for features that we deemed as fundamentally important to use Genode as a general-purpose system. Now that we have reached most of the feature set that we longed after, the project adjusts its focus. According to our recently published roadmap, the underlying theme of the current development shifted towards the cultivation of the existing feature set rather than the introduction of new functionality. The current release perfectly reflects this change. It introduces a highly modular tool kit for scaling up the project's automated testing efforts and comes with stability and performance improvements all over the place. In particular, we are happy to report substantial performance gains of our version of VirtualBox running on NOVA.

As a second focus of the version 15.02, our custom base-hw kernel platform received a lot of attention. The most prominent news is the added support for virtualization on ARM. This line of work has been conducted and refined over the time span of more than a year and took much of our prior experience with the NOVA virtualization architecture and ARM TrustZone into account. This experience resulted in a novel microhypervisor design with an extremely tiny foot print with respect to the added complexity on the account of virtualization support. In fact, less than 1000 lines of code had to be added to the root of the trusted computing base. Besides virtualization support, our kernel's scheduler got refined to take IPC relationships into account while additionally gaining support for the USB Armory hardware platform.

These and many more improvements are covered in more detail by the release documentation of version 15.02...