I am very happy to announce the release of Genode 21.02, which features the results of three long-term developments.
First, it introduces the ability to start, re-start, remove, and update network device drivers at runtime, following the approach we already took for framebuffer and input drivers last year. With this architectural change, the liveliness of network-application stacks no longer depends on the robustness of the used network drivers.
Second, the release brings a long anticipated update of VirtualBox. The addition of VirtualBox 6 is not merely an evolutionary update of our aging VirtualBox 5 version. Instead, we repeated the legwork of porting this complex software stack from the ground up, drawing from the many lessons learned since our initial port of VirtualBox 4 in 2014, and refining Genode's virtualization interfaces along the way. The initial version of VirtualBox 6 should nevertheless be regarded as a snapshot of our ongoing development, not as a drop-in replacement of VirtualBox 5, yet.
Third, Genode has now became able to use mobile-data connectivity over LTE. The work on the modem stack ranged from device drivers, over the porting of protocol-stack implementations, up to the network-configuration level. It goes without saying that this is an important building block for our ambition to run Genode on the Pinephone by the end of the year.
Besides these prominent topics, the new version comes with many further improvements as summarized below.
- Pluggable network device drivers - LTE modem stack - VirtualBox 6.1.14 - Improved USB pass-through for VirtualBox 5 - VirtIO block devices for virtual machines on ARM - Power-gating of PCI devices on x86 - Pine-A64-LTS single board computer - RISC-V update to privileged ISA 1.10 - VFS support for named pipes - OpenSSL 1.1.1i, curl 7.70.0
The full story is presented by our detailed release documentation at:
https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/21.02
Cheers Norman