Hi Paul,

Well, february 2013 is at our door now, and I would like to remember us of the plan for it according to our 2013 roadmap:

-Low-latency audio support The current audio_out-session interface was our first shot into the direction of audio processing. To enable use cases where streaming audio and sporadic sounds must be accommodated at the same time, we need to revise our approach.

This line of work (conducted by Sebastian Sumpf) has been merged into master. See the following commits for more details:

https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/commit/238d6a29c508ec776137362bc71363a1...

https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/commit/47bb48bdd6fa688cd91585412326e1f6...

https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/commit/5aea55e4172ce6ff9641e639bb3e24ea...

We still need to thoroughly test the new solution on real hardware and at least one virtualization solution (i.e., VirtualBox). For the release, we plan to document the design of the new interface and the rationale behind it.

-IOMMU support on NOVA

This topic is being worked on by Alexander Böttcher. See here:

https://github.com/alex-ab/genode/commits/nova_iommu_v0

In addition, Alex largely refined the base-nova code to enable dynamic workloads on this kernel. This work includes pretty substantial changes of the kernel. These changes are available in his fork of the kernel:

https://github.com/alex-ab/NOVA/commits/r1

-First steps of user-interface concept --UI concept for pleasant working environment --Tiled window manager --Terminal improvements (e.g., scroll buffer) --Noux improvements (e.g., signals)

These points remain largely unaddressed. I expect that we will see progress on them after FOSDEM. I will certainly be involved in these topics.

-Improved x86 virtualization support --Improved virtualization support (Vancouver on NOVA)

There is an open pull request about this topic:

https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/pull/582

Udo Steinberg agreed to revisit the patches to incorporate my feedback. After that, we will integrate them into staging and document and test the new version of the Vancouver VMM.

In addition to the mentioned topics, the February release will bring principal support for the Exynos5-based Arndale platform for our custom base-hw kernel. See Martin Stein's topic branch:

https://github.com/m-stein/genode/commits/arndale

Regards Norman

Hello,

this is a short follow-up on my last email regarding the status of the release.

...

-IOMMU support on NOVA

This topic is being worked on by Alexander Böttcher. See here:

https://github.com/alex-ab/genode/commits/nova_iommu_v0

The design has been subsequently refined in order to spare driver developers the hassle to distinguish the presence of an IOMMU from non-IOMMU case manually. The current version is ready to be merged. If you want to have a look:

https://github.com/alex-ab/genode/commits/nova_iommu_v4

There is work in progress to adapt our base device drivers to the new facility such that those drivers (e.g., AHCI, USB) will function well on systems with IOMMU enabled.

...

-First steps of user-interface concept --UI concept for pleasant working environment --Tiled window manager --Terminal improvements (e.g., scroll buffer) --Noux improvements (e.g., signals)

These points remain largely unaddressed. I expect that we will see progress on them after FOSDEM. I will certainly be involved in these topics.

Due to an illness (that hit me just after returning from FOSDEM), I was not able to dedicate much implementation work to these points. However, the design of a possible solution is slowly forming in my head. :-)

Instead of working on these points to come up with a half-baked solution, I used the remaining time to address some long-standing issues (in the most literal sense possible: I fixed issue #1):

https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/issues/1

Also, I took the chance to reorganize the libraries that are forming the base API implementation:

https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/issues/18

https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/commit/fae63f4fa9df237a5fa3d658b870def1...

Both topics are quite far-reaching and come with API changes. The best time to merge such changes is shortly prior a release because this way, both people who use the git master branch and people who use the release version will use the same API.

...

-Improved x86 virtualization support --Improved virtualization support (Vancouver on NOVA)

There is an open pull request about this topic:

https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/pull/582

Udo Steinberg agreed to revisit the patches to incorporate my feedback. After that, we will integrate them into staging and document and test the new version of the Vancouver VMM.

Thanks to Udo for reworking the patch series! I further streamlined the commits to make them fit well with our code base and merged the result into the master branch.

For wrapping up the release, we will merge the IOMMU code and the base-hw Arndale code next, and write up the release notes.

Regards Norman