I am very happy to announce the release of Genode version 11.11. With this version, we explored various opportunities to combine the Genode architecture with virtualization techniques. The topics range from enabling faithful virtualization of x86 PC hardware, over paravirtualized Android, to our custom OS-level and application-level virtualization approaches. The work on these topics materialized in the form of many improvements of the framework.
To name a few, the new version features the GDB debugging facility as announced earlier on this mailing list, the integration of the Vancouver virtual machine monitor, the support of running Android based on the work of the L4Android project, and the new ability to execute complex command-line based UNIX software (i.e., VIM) natively on Genode.
For regular developers, our new free-standing tool chain significantly improves the situation when developing for different architectures. In particular, this new tool chain alleviates the need for using CodeSourcery tools for ARM and enables the targeting of both x86_32 and x86_64 with a single compiler.
The release-notes summary is:
* Support for user-level debugging via GDB * Applications and services * Vancouver virtual machine monitor on NOVA * VIM executed on the Noux runtime environment * Terminal emulator implementing the Linux termcap * TCP terminal * Platforms * Fiasco.OC updated to rev 38 * NOVA updated to version 0.4 * New IPC implementation for Linux * Improved support for hybrid Linux/Genode programs * L4Linux on Fiasco.OC * Integration of L4Android (for both x86_32 and ARM) * Stub drivers for block devices, NIC, UART * Device drivers * gPXE device driver environment upgraded to iPXE * Bidirectional UART driver for PL011 and i8250 * PL110 display driver * Support for ARM Versatile Express Cortex-A9x4 * Libc update to FreeBSD 8.2.0 * New unified tool chain based on GCC 4.6.1
As usual, you will find a more elaborative discussion of those topics in our comprehensive release-notes document for version 11.11:
http://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/11.11
Have fun with exploring the new version!
Norman