users December 2020

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Network issue
by Dima Sokolov 01 Feb '21

01 Feb '21

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Roadmap 2021
by Norman Feske 19 Jan '21

19 Jan '21

Dear Genode community, the end of the strange year 2020 comes in sight. So now it is time to kick off our annual road-map discussion. I'll keep up with our tradition of reviewing the past 12 months from my personal perspective, dropping my ideas for the upcoming year, and inviting you to share your ideas and plans. Review of 2020 -------------- The overarching theme of our road map for 2020 was "Dwarfing the barrier of entry", which expressed the ambition to reach a wider audience. On that account, we identified four promising directions: First, making Sculpt OS palatable for a wider circle. Second, fostering the public perception of the high quality of Genode to reinforce the confidence of people who are sceptical towards novel operating-system technology. Third, lowering the barrier of entry by providing frictionless tooling. And fourth, publicly presenting use cases that prove the fitness and flexibility of Genode. These directions certainly did a good job of motivating the working topics of this year's four releases [1,2,3,4]. [1] https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/20.02 [2] https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/20.05 [3] https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/20.08 [4] https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/20.11 The UI improvements of Sculpt OS in version 20.02 largely eliminated the need to use the command line, as shown in my live demo [5]. But the work on the user-visible side of Sculpt has admittedly dried up a bit since spring time. Software quality has been a continuous topic. Personally, I dedicated a lot of energy to the improvement and consolidation of our POSIX support (Noux vs. libc) and the related infrastructure like the VFS server. [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmgWgzeKAjU That said, despite the many technical advances, the stated soft goal of reaching a broader audience remains fairly distant. Genode has not seen a significantly wider adoption by the open-source community at large compared to one year ago. On the other hand, regarding our stated commitment to 64-bit ARM hardware, in particular supporting the NXP i.MX8 SoC, there is a strong sense of accomplishment, which makes me proud. The depth and breadth of this line of work has been fantastic. I'm speaking of 64-bit multi-core virtualization, HDMI, touch input, OLED, networking, LTE, USB, clock and power management, VirtIO, up to running Sculpt OS on this platform. It is a huge success story on a technical account. Regarding our reach to a broader community, we are super excited about the prospect of combining Genode with the MNT-Reform laptop that is based on the i.MX8 SoC. When speaking of i.MX8 one year ago, I also had the Librem5 in mind - envisioning Genode on a smart-phone form factor. But that hope remained abstract as we did not succeed to establish a correspondence with the makers of the Librem5. The vision of a Genode-based smart phone, however, has become stronger than ever (see below). While reading the paragraphs above, you may sense my ambiguous feelings about the past year's road map. I think we missed the stated goal. I also think that we excelled at technological progress. For us developers, the road map serves primarily as orientation for our technical work. But since the past year's goal of increasing adoption hasn't been a technical one, no level of technical excellence will magically bring us there. So the goal was a bit delusionally to begin with. Let us lift this pressure for the next year and concentrate on the technical level. My personal ambitions for 2021 ------------------------------ * By the end of the year, I want to use a Genode-based mobile phone, replacing my current Nokia 3720. I'll focus on the _Pinephone_. In fact, I have already taken the first baby steps and will continue to thoroughly document this line of work at https://genodians.org. * I see plenty of opportunities for optimization throughout Genode and would like to make _optimization_ the motto of the year. The following ideas are spontaneously crossing my mind: - Profiling and tuning of Unix-like workloads, in particular by looking at file-system access patterns. - Fostering the batching of async I/O, e.g., increasing the chance for the batching of network packets. - Let our ARM tool chain use the hard-float calling convention. - Replace the allocator of our C runtime by jemalloc. - Reducing the overhead of our POSIX TLS mechanism. - Taking XML parsing off the critical path for the dynamic reconfiguration of init. - Removing indirections, in particular the old libc plugin interface. - Reducing the inflation of binaries by C++ templates. - Improving compilation times by reducing header interdependencies. - Merging core's CPU and PD service into one. * I'm convinced that we have to dramatically reduce the engineering effort needed to port device drivers from the Linux kernel to Genode. Backed by our practical DDE-Linux experience, a few ideas have formed in the back of my head. They want out. So I see my work with the Pinephone as a welcome opportunity for experimenting in this direction. What's your perspective? ------------------------ For drafting the road map of next year, I'm eagerly interested in the perspective of my fellow developers and of course users of Genode. How do you perceive the outcome of the year? What areas would you wish to concentrate on? Where do you see untapped potential of Genode? How do you envision Genode in December 2021? I would very much appreciate your input for forming a rough picture of next year. Of course, not all ideas will make it to the road map. Economic constraints and the willingness of pro-active participation play a major role. Regarding the timeline, I plan to announce the official road map for 2021 in mid of January. Cheers Norman -- Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske Genode Labs https://www.genode-labs.com · https://genode.org Genode Labs GmbH · Amtsgericht Dresden · HRB 28424 · Sitz Dresden Geschäftsführer: Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske, Christian Helmuth

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mmap implementation for ANON mapping with desired address
by Alexander Tormasov 21 Dec '20

21 Dec '20

I am trying to implement not-yet supported (as mentioned by nfeske@ in mailing list) option for mmap() related to anonymous mapping with pre-defined (desired) address. Like libc function with desired address out_addr. void *Libc::Mem_alloc_impl::alloc_at(void *out_addr, size_t size) I use a couple of useful function in avl allocator. Anyway, I found that straight - forward implementation do not work because of allocation gaps filled together with main allocation. In particular, if we want to allocate e.g. 0x10000 from address 0x500000 then we typically allocate 0x13000 bytes, including ones for avl metadata/etc stored in the same space, and receive virtual address range used, e.g. 0x500000 - 0x513000: /* * Calculate block size of needed backing store. The block must hold the * requested 'size' with the requested alignment, a new Dataspace structure * and space for AVL-node slab blocks if the allocation above failed. * Finally, we align the size to a 4K page. */ size_t request_size = size + max((1 << align_log2), 1024) + Allocator_avl::slab_block_size() + sizeof(Dataspace); Software I used (golang runtime) sometimes try to expand previous allocation, e.g. it can request allocation of 0x8000 bytes before previous range, like 0x4f8000 - 0x500000. In that case I can’t perform the operation - because it will try to allocate 0xa000 bytes from desired address 0x4f8000 - and it obviously fail due to Range_conflict. So, I split allocation to 2 parts - one for this gap by standard alloc() and random placement and second one by my own alloc_at() with size exactly correspond to the requested one. Implementation available as a patch to 20.05 at https://github.com/tor-m6/genode/commit/78fc751bea8acc2b515e04bec9f3a883461… Problem I see here is a free operation: it just free the block with requested address, and do not touch others, gap-related blocks. For me it is not obvious that they need to be free, because in the code (e.g. by unmap()) I do not see explicit free of other allocated structures, in particular, dataspace extension or related block metadata. Question: should I make additional efforts to trace and delete something else - except what standard free does here: /* forward request to our local allocator */ _alloc.free(addr); Like for dataspace structure or address ranges for second «auxiliary» allocation? PS Another potential problem is a probability to overlap of first «random address» allocation with desired address. This happens with first attempt to implement allocator - it allocates address from desired range, and immediately put here 0x18 bytes of Dataspace structure, and then fail because requested address is already busy by this structure! Anyway, I consider such a probability relatively small with proposed approach and ignore it (may be I am wrong)

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My roadmap
by Michael Grunditz 19 Dec '20

19 Dec '20

Hi everyone, I was reading the 2020 reflections on Genode. Here is my plans for 2021 related to Genode: 1) Make the RK3399 port complete which for example includes PineBook Pro. HDMI will be easy, and I think eDP will be as well. The question is if doing it with DDE-Linux or from scratch. The RK3399 port is really only a exercise for me , since we already is on our way with a native port of RISC OS. But I guess a port of Genode can be useful for others. 2) RISC OS kernel running on top of base-hw , big project: 2a) The RISC OS kernel is written in ARM assembler, I will attempt to bring it over to C. 2b) Replace HAL with Genode facilities. 2c) Write some kind of emulation layer. RISC OS uses SWI for everything and that will not work on 64bit. It will be important to be able to run 32bit programs. 2d) Bring up Genode on all future aarch64 systems! 3) Bring up Genode on A64... I guess it might have been done partly already. It is the SoC that PinePhone is built on. I have been in the team porting RISC OS to A64 , so I know a few things. The only thing we haven't done natively is graphics. The only doc for DE 2.0 is a register description (VERY large document). No appnotes which makes it close to impossible to do without looking at BSP. We used simplefb , that is , starting graphics in uboot and use the resulting framebuffer. NetBSD also does graphics this way. 4) Learn to use the DDE-Linux. I hope that 2021 will be healthier :) Best regards, Michael Grundiitz

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update openssl port
by Duss Pirmin 17 Dec '20

17 Dec '20

Hi Genodians On December 08. 2020 the openssl project issued a security advisory (https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv/20201208.txt). I started looking into binging the latest version of openssl (1.1.1i) to Genode. I have a first version of the library that compiles on x86_64. When I started testing components I encountered the following things: - `wpa_supplicant` (wifi driver) compiles, but running it fails due to a symbol the dynamic linker can't find - `lighttpd` compiles, but running it fails due to a symbol the dynamic linker can't find - `libssh` doesn't compile (it looks, as it uses data structures that were moved to internal only in version 1.1.x of openssl) - `openvpn` (repo genode-world) doesn't compile (it looks, as it uses data structures that were moved to internal only in version 1.1.x of openssl) - `grpc` (repo genode-world) compiles with some warnings about using deprecated functions - `grpc_tls/client` and `grpc_tls/server` (repo genode-world) can be built I'm thinking about how to proceed with this. One way that I see, is to create a separate port (e.g. `openssl_1.1`) that provides the updated library. Then each component can choose to use the old or the new version of the library. When a component (or library) is updated, one can choose to switch to the new library if it is supported. In the long run the old version of openssl could then be removed once all users of it have switched. Do you agree with proceeding according to this plan or would you approach this differently? Best regards, Pirmin

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vfs fifo pipe and file system session write
by Stefan Thöni 09 Dec '20

09 Dec '20

Hello Genodians We are still trying to introduce a named pipe for communication between libc components and pure genode components. Our vfs fifo pipe now works with multiple threads in the same process, but only when it's hosted in the vfs of that same component. As soon as we host it in separate vfs component it stalls randomly. Our analysis shows that the reason for this lies in the implementation of the file system session interface, where the write operation doesn't report back the number of bytes written but the receiving vfs component instead retries the write operation. This leads to a permanent blocking of the vfs component as no read operation can alleviate the full buffer of the fifo pipe. We think the only proper fix would be a change in the file system session to allow the write operation to report back the number of bytes written. Is there a specific reason to keep the write 'fire-and-forget', other than simplicity? Best regards Stefan -- Freundliche Grüsse Stefan Thöni Chairman of the Board Senior Security Architect +41 79 610 64 95 gapfruit AG Baarerstrasse 135 6300 Zug https://gapfruit.com

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whether genode c++ support RTTI
by yadong.li 09 Dec '20

09 Dec '20

Hi， I am a newer， I have some question about genode about c++ RTTI My test command is “make -C build/x86_32 KERNEL=sel4 BOARD=pc run/demo”, my genode version is “19.02” I add “typeid”, compile warning “must inclue <typeinfo>”, but this must compile add “stdcxx” lib, If add stdcxx, they need “Libc::Component::construct”, it is conflict with “Component::construct” of genode How can I resolve it, or Is there some demo support c++RTTI ? Thank you very much

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CfP: FOSDEM 2021 - Microkernel Devroom
by Martin Decky 07 Dec '20

07 Dec '20

Microkernel Devroom at FOSDEM 2021 CALL FOR PARTICIPATION On-line version of this CfP: http://fosdem.microkernel.info/ The developers and users of several free and open source microkernel-based operating systems will meet on-line as part of FOSDEM 2021 [1] and will share a developer room. The devroom is currently looking for content in the form of talks and activities related to the area of microkernel-based, unikernel-based, component-based operating systems and similar topics. The devroom has been preliminarily scheduled to Saturday February 6th 2021. The devroom will take place during European day hours. Possible topics of the devroom include, but are not limited to: * introduction of a specific OS or framework * design of subsystems and the general architecture of an OS * used languages, tools and toolchains * enabling support for hardware (architectures, device drivers) * enabling support for programming languages * development processes, debugging * maintenance, testing and release engineering * security and robustness * trends and challenges * community and governance * use cases, experiences and status updates * best practices, lessons learned and demos This is a call for your participation. We kindly ask you to submit your proposals no later than on December 26th 2020. Please use the Pentabarf website [2] to submit your proposals. If you already have a user account in Pentabarf, please do not create a new one. Please make sure to select the Microkernel devroom as the track when submitting your talk and include at least the following information in your proposal: * title of your talk * your full name * short abstract of your talk (one or two paragraphs) * duration of your talk (at least 20 minutes and no longer than 50 minutes), excluding a Q&A part * your short bio * your photo The talks will be pre-recorded in advance in January and streamed during the event. This means that you will need to complete and submit your talk by around mid January. However, each speaker should be also present on-line just after the streaming of the talk for a live Q&A. You can specify your prefered time slot of your talk. The communication language of the devroom is English. The official devroom schedule (along with the accepted talks) will be announced on December 31st 2020 on the devroom's mailing list [3] and the speakers will be notified via e-mail. The schedule will also be published on the FOSDEM website. You are also invited to send any other suggestions for what you want to see or do at the devroom to the mailing list. About the Devroom Since the first Microkernel devroom at FOSDEM 2012 [4], this devroom has been part of each following FOSDEM. The focus gradually widened to include component-based and unikernel-based operating systems. By now it has become a somewhat institutionalized tradition for the community to meet there. To this date, over a dozen projects have participated in one way or another. Each of the projects face similar challenges but come up with partially different solutions. Therefore, the goal of the devroom is to bring the various projects together, let them exchange ideas, cross-pollinate and socialize. Extraordinary Circumstances in 2021 Due to the extraordinary mode of organization of FOSDEM 2021 (being an on-line event for the first time), many practical aspects of the devroom are still in the process of determination. For example, the devroom talks will be required to be pre-recorded in January and streamed during the event (with a live Q&A), but the technical details are still sketchy at this moment. The talk videos will be published under Creative Commons license by FOSDEM. By submitting a recorded talk, the speaker agrees to have it made available publicly indefinitively. For organizational purposes, we also need contact information of the speakers of accepted talks. Please check the official CfP page [5] of our devroom regularly. We will keep updating it as new guidelines will be determined by the FOSDEM organizers. Sadly, it will not be possible to arrange our traditional microkernel dinner and other in-person social gatherings in Brussels this time. However, we plan to organize an on-line replacement. The details will be announced later in January. On the other hand, the on-line nature of the devroom allows us to "overflow" to a second day in case we receive a substatial number of quality proposals. About FOSDEM FOSDEM [6] is a two-day event organised by volunteers to promote the widespread use of free and open source software. FOSDEM is widely recognised as one of the best such conferences worldwide. FOSDEM covers a wide spectrum of free and open source software and hardware projects and offers a platform for people to collaborate. To this end, FOSDEM has set up developer rooms (devrooms) where teams can meet and showcase their projects. Devrooms are a place for teams to discuss, hack and publicly present latest directions, lightning talks, news and proposals. Besides developer rooms, FOSDEM also offers main tracks, lightning talks, and in the past instances certification exams and project stands. In recent years, FOSDEM has been hosting more than 5000 developers at the ULB Solbosch campus. Due to the circumstances, FOSDEM 2021 will be organized as an on-line event. Despite this, the participation in FOSDEM is still totally free, although the organisers gratefully accept donations and sponsorship. No registration is necessary, but attendees are expected to follow the FOSDEM's code of conduct [7]. Important Dates Recap * 2020-12-26: Deadline for talk proposal submission * 2020-12-31: Schedule published and speakers notified of acceptance * mid January 2021: Time frame for talk pre-recoding * 2021-02-06: Devroom taking place on-line Contact In case of any questions, comments and suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact the devroom organizers via the devroom's mailing list [3]. The primary organizers of the devroom in 2021 are: * Martin Decky * Jakub Jermar Links [1] https://fosdem.org/2021/ [2] https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM21/ [3] https://lists.fosdem.org/listinfo/microkernel-devroom [4] https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/schedule/track/microkernel_os_devroom.html [5] http://fosdem.microkernel.info/ [6] https://fosdem.org/ [7] https://fosdem.org/2021/practical/conduct/

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Run SculptOS in i.MX8MQ-EVK
by fixed-term.christo.bita＠sojus-software.de 04 Dec '20

04 Dec '20

Hello all together, according to "Genode OS Framework release 20.11" SculptOS can run on the i.MX8MQ EVK board. I wanted to run the example so I did the following steps: 1)start the run Sculpt run-script tool/create_builddir arm_v8a cd build/arm_v8a make run/sculpt KERNEL=hw BOARD=imx8q_evk -after this a have an "image.elf" file in "BUILD_DIR/var/run/sculpt/boot" directory. 2)copy in the SD-Card dd if=image.elf of=/dev/"mySDcard" bs=1k seek=33 conv=fsync 3)select the boot device in the board Boot-Mode[3:0] = 0011 (SD card) The board is connected to a HDMI monitor. Unfortunately I don't get any log information. Maybe am I missing some middle steps or doing something wrong? Any help is very welcomed! Best regard, Christo

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users December 2020