Genode 18.08 brings modern hardware support

[Stefan Kalkowski]

Dear l4-hackers,

the community and team around the Genode OS framework proudly presents
release 18.08, which is at the same time the 10th anniversary of our
project.

With this release we follow our ambition to sculpt a general-purpose
OS using the Genode framework. It adds support for a lot of different
recent hardware, the ability to apply Intel microcode updates in a
kernel agnostic fashion, and extends the interactive usability of the
system.

Readers of this mailing list might be especially interested in the
update of the NOVA and Fiasco.OC kernels used by the framework to
recent versions.

The highlights of Genode 18.08 are:

- Sculpt OS with live runtime view
- Device drivers
  - Linux device-driver environment based on kernel 4.16.3
  - Updated and enhanced Intel framebuffer and wireless drivers
  - De-componentized USB stack, support for isochronous devices
  - Improved device compatibility of NIC and PS/2 drivers
  - Experimental runtime for Zircon-based drivers
- Base framework and OS-level infrastructure
  - NIC-router support for multiple uplinks
  - New VFS plugin for using LwIP as TCP/IP stack
  - Cached file-system-based ROM service
  - VFS plugin for importing initial content
  - Enhanced Ada language support
- Libraries and applications
  - Python 3
  - VirtualBox 5.1.38
- Platforms
  - New Intel Microcode update mechanism
  - Multiprocessor support for our custom kernel on x86
  - Updated NOVA and Fiasco.OC kernels

All of these and more improvements can be read in detail in the
release documentation:

  https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/18.08

We are looking forward for your feedback.

Happy hacking!

-- 
Stefan Kalkowski
Genode labs

https://github.com.skalk | https://genode.org