Hello everyone,

I'm happy to announce the May 2025 release of Genode.

https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/25.05

According to this year's motto "rigidity, clarity, and performance", the Genode 25.05 release focuses on API safety, consolidation work, and developer tooling.The most prominent change in this release is the much revised framework API that no longer relies on the C++ exception mechanism but precisely encodes all possible error conditions as sum types, an inspiration taken from the Rust-language community. This approach rules out several classes of programming errors by design and, thus, enforces the conscious handling of error conditions, eliminates the accidental leakage of pointers, as well as promotes clarity of object ownership and lifetimes.

The fair amount of consolidation work in the this release includes, for example, the unified integration of the Linux and lwIP TCP/IP stacks paving the ground for subsequent network-protocol improvements and optimizations. Feature-wise, we add a new VFS plugin for generating pseudo random numbers, support for touch gestures, and display rotation and flipping on Intel hardware. Also following our biennial update routine, we use a recent tool chain based on GCC 14.2, binutils 2.44, and GDB 16.3 starting with this release for the next 24 months. Further, the Goa SDK now mitigates security risks while importing, building, and testing projects of unvetted origin by sandboxing all tools and tightly restricting the reach of its own configuration files.

The current release contains the following changes and new features:

- Tool chain upgraded to GCC 14.2 and binutils 2.44 - Hardened API, leveraging sum types for error handling - Security-enhanced Goa SDK - New support for touch gestures - New VFS plugin for generating pseudo random numbers - Revisited integration of the Linux and lwIP TCP/IP stacks - Display rotation and flipping on Intel hardware - Dynamic mode switching and reporting of the VESA display driver

Read the complete release documentation for the version 25.05 here

https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/25.05

Best regards