Announcement: Genode OS Framework version 21.02 released

[Norman Feske]

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

-- 
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