Guest post by Following the three-months release schedule, version 9.08 of the Genode Operating-System Framework has been released, bringing improvements all over the code base and introducing new features such as a dynamic linker, and long desired support for super pages and write-combined I/O access. As described in the release notes, the overall theme of this release had been refinement, resulting in much improved implementations for key parts of the framework. In particular, Genode’s synchronization primitives such as locks and signals had received much attention, and the central timer service have been replaced by a much improved implementation.
Furthermore, there are many improvements specific for the different base platforms. The OKL4-kernel support as added with the previous release motivated code unifications among all four supported kernel platforms.The kernel-specific lines of code, which provide complete kernel abstractions, have become as little as 1800 (OKL4), 1500 (Linux), 1600 (L4/Fiasco), and 2000 (L4ka::Pistachio) lines of C++ code.
With regard to Linux as base platform, the project reached its goal to make the base framework completely independent from Linux’ userland infrastructure.Core is now executed on the raw Linux kernel without linking against glibc.Thereby, the Linux version of Genode is on the way to become the lowest-complexity (regarding source-code complexity) Linux-kernel-based OS available.
The introduction of the dynamic linker ported from FreeBSD promises a significant reduction of binary sizes and, thereby, will finally allay fears about the resource requirements of using Qt4 on Genode.
Read on about all the improvements in the release notes for version 9.08.
I really like what is coming of these modern microkernels, especially in terms of their potential in being lean hosts for embedded systems or hypervisors for virtual machines. I wonder how it would be if more of the alternative operating systems ran with something like this, if hardware support could become more unified. Genode is one highly interesting project.