

              ===============================================
              Release notes for the Genode OS Framework 13.05
              ===============================================

                               Genode Labs



With Genode 13.05, we have diverged quite a bit from the feature-laden plans
laid out in our [https://genode.org/about/road-map road map] as we realized
that consolidating and optimizing the current feature set will have a more
sustainable effect than functional enhancements at this point. In particular,
we addressed the problem that the ever growing diversity of platforms imposes
on the quality and coverage of testing. We also desired to extend our
systematic testing efforts to real hardware platforms, and to have a mechanism
for detecting performance regressions. Section
[Automated quality-assurance testing] details how we approached these
challenges, and how we went on analyzing Genode's network performance in
particular.

That said, we haven't completely restrained ourself from implementing new
features. Closely related to test automation but very useful in other
situations, we improved the terminal infrastructure in order to enable the
interactive use of dynamic system scenarios in headless situations. Section
[Terminal infrastructure] introduces a new command-line interface for managing
Genode subsystems.

With regard to platform support, the current release follows up on the
hardware support added in the previous releases. For Samsung Exynos-5-based
platforms, drivers for USB-3, fast-ethernet networking, gigabit networking,
eMMC, and SATA have been added. For Freescale i.MX53-based devices, new
drivers for display, touchscreen, and GPIO have become available. The
OMAP4 display driver has been enhanced to cover both LCD displays and HDMI.
Our custom base-hw kernel has been enabled on the Raspberry Pi
board. Finally, Linux/ARM was added to accompany Linux/x86 as a fully usable
Genode base platform.


Automated quality-assurance testing
###################################

One of the greatest challenges of the Genode OS Framework is preventing
regressions in the face of the growing number of supported platforms.
The challenge stems from the fact that the space of Genode scenarios grow
two-dimensional. On one axis, the software stack on top of Genode gets more
and more complex, which calls for contiguous testing. On the other axis, there
is a growing number of kernel and hardware platforms to support.
In principle, there are even more dimensions, for example the diversity
of tool chains or the diversity of the OS used on the development machine.
Luckily, the problem of tool-chain diversity could be mitigated with the
introduction of the Genode tool chain since version 11.11, which was a huge
relief. However, the mentioned two dimensions cannot be avoided. Because
manual testing of manifold scenarios of component compositions on top of many
different kernels became infeasible, we automated the task of building and
testing years ago.

The automated builder checks out the staging branch of Genode, prepares
the repositories that integrate 3rd-party code, and builds the software
for 12 different kernel/platform combinations. Not all 3rd-party software
packages are built for each combination though. But we make sure that each
piece of software is exposed to different combinations of CPU architectures
and kernels.

The build test is accompanied with automated runtime tests of various
run scripts on Qemu. Each run script listed in 'tool/autopilot.lst' is
executed on each kernel using the autopilot tool. The tests range from
stimulating low-level mechanisms (such as signal, timer, and ldso) to complex
scenarios (such as testing networking with L4Linux, or running Noux).

Both build and runtime tests are executed daily. If any of the
tests fail, the Genode developers receive a notification email.
Once all tests are passed, the staging branch can be merged into the master
branch. This way, we spare the users of Genode to deal with intermediate
problems introduced in the staging branch.

The build and runtime tests have become a fundamental tool for our
development work. With the growing variety of real hardware
(as opposed to hardware emulated via Qemu), however, our existing solution
was falling short. Even though our tests confirm that Genode is running
happily on Qemu, they won't help us to detect regressions in our device
drivers for non-Qemu hardware such as Pandaboard, Arndale, or modern PC
hardware. Furthermore, we are increasingly focussing on performance
considerations. In order to be a viable OS platform, Genode does not only need
to be able to do networking, but networking performance must be on par with
mainstream OSes. This raises the new challenge to extend our
continuous-testing tools to become continuous-benchmarking tools. The ultimate
goal is to monitor the performance of Genode on real hardware over long
periods of development.

In this release cycle, we attacked this problem in two steps. First, we
enabled Genode's run tool to target not only Qemu but real hardware, with the
premise that existing run scripts must not be changed. The second step is the
creation of new run scripts that perform benchmarks in an automated fashion.
By aggregating the results of this automatically executed benchmarks, we can
correlate performance effects with commits in our code repository.


Targeting real hardware via the run tool
========================================

In the following, we briefly describe the procedure to execute run scripts
on native hardware, for both Intel-based x86 machines and ARM-based platforms.


TFTP boot x86
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The following description uses NOVA as an example to illustrate the usage.
Other base platforms are supported as well and can be configured analogously.

[https://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~us15/pulsar/ - Pulsar] is a tiny boot loader
that uses PXE to fetch boot images via TFTP over the network. On the x86
architecture, Genode supports the automatic generation of Pulsar configuration
files, which can be placed directly onto a TFTP server. Genode can be booted
via Pulsar using the following steps:

* On the x86 test machine, enable "PXE boot feature" in the BIOS.
* When booting, the machine will look for a DHCP server announcing a TFTP server.
  So you need to make sure to have both the DHCP server and the TFTP server
  configured such that the 'pulsar' binary will be loaded as PXE binary.
* After the PXE BIOS of the test machine has loaded and started the pulsar
  binary, Pulsar will look on the TFTP server for a file called
  'config-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX-XX', where the sequence of 'XX' corresponds to the
  MAC address of the test machine.
  For example, if the MAC of the network card is 01:02:03:04:05:06, Pulsar
  would request a file called 'config-01-02-03-04-05-06'.
* Using this configuration file, we direct Pulsar to the configuration
  generated by the run tool. I.e., it should look as follows
  ! root /tftpboot/nova
  ! config config-00-00-00-00-00-00
  The lines above tell pulsar to load another config file, which contains the
  actual configuration. To instruct the run script to actually generate the
  'config-00-00-00-00-00-00' file, set the following environment variables in
  your shell prior executing the run script:
  ! export PXE_TFTP_DIR_BASE=/tftpboot
  ! export PXE_TFTP_DIR_OFFSET=/nova

  The two-staged configuration of Pulsar may look overly complicated at first
  sight but has the benefit that the run tool does not need to know the MAC
  address of the test machine in order to generate the Pulsar configuration
  file.

* Create a symbolic link '/tftpboot/nova' pointing to the corresponding
  Genode build directory.

* The next time 'make run/printf' is invoked,
  the run script will generate the 'config-00-00-00-00-00-00' in
  '/tftpboot/nova'.

* When rebooting the test machine, it will load and start the printf test.


TFTP boot using U-Boot
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Configure your U-Boot boot loader to load the images via TFTP.

The remainder of the procedure is similar to the description for x86 above.
On ARM platforms, the run tool automatically generates the uBoot image and
creates a symbolic link into the TFTP directory.

* Pandaboard:

  ! export PXE_TFTP_DIR_BASE=/tftpboot
  ! export PXE_TFTP_DIR_OFFSET=/panda
  ! ln -s <genode-build-dir> /tftpboot/panda
  ! RUN_OPT="--target uboot" make run/printf

* Arndale board:

  ! export PXE_TFTP_DIR_BASE=/tftpboot
  ! export PXE_TFTP_DIR_OFFSET=/arndale
  ! ln -s <genode-build-dir> /tftpboot/panda
  ! RUN_OPT="--target uboot" make run/printf



Output and reset with Intel's AMT
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Most modern x86-based machines lack a COM port, which is normally used for
kernel debug messages as well as LOG messages printed by Genode's core.
However, Intel's Advanced Management Technology (AMT) can be used to obtain
the serial output of the test machine and to reset the test machine. To use
AMT with Genode's run tool, install the 'amtterm' package (version 1.3 is
known to work well) and set the following environment variables, specifying
the IP address of the test machine and the AMT password.

! export AMT_TEST_MACHINE_IP=XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
! export AMT_TEST_MACHINE_PWD=XXXXXXXXX

Via setting the RUN_OPT environment variable, we instruct the run tool to use
AMT instead of Qemu. The following command will reset the test machine, the test
machine will load the binaries of the printf run script via PXE, and we will be
able to see the serial output of the test machine through Intel's AMT Serial
Over Line (SOL),

! RUN_OPT="--target amt" make run/printf


Output via a COM port (UART)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If the x86 test machine, Pandaboard or Arndale test board is connected
via UART, the run tool can use a specified command to interact with it.

For example, if the UART interface of the test machine is connected directly
to the host machine at /dev/ttyUSB3, and the picocom tool is available,
the following command can be used to establish a connection:

! RUN_OPT="--target serial --serial-cmd \"picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB3\"" make run/printf

Alternatively, if the board is connected to some remote machine, which exports
the corresponding serial line via TCP/IP, the socat tool can be used for
communicating with the remote test machine:

! RUN_OPT="--target serial --serial-cmd \"socat - tcp:10.0.0.1:2000\"" make run/printf


Reset via a IP power plug NETIO-230B from Koukaam
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

At Genode Labs, we use a NETIO-230B power plug to automate power-cycling ARM
boards. This power plug can be controlled over the network. For example, if
the Pandaboard is connected to power port 3, the following command will
automatically turn on the board when the run script is started:

! RUN_OPT="--target uboot --target reset --reset-port 2 --reset-ip 10.0.0.1 --reset-user admin --reset-passwd secret" make run/printf

The '--target reset' option can be combined with '--target uboot' to
instruct the run tool to boot via TFTP (as described above) and take care
of power cycling. When the run script has finished, the specified port
will be automatically switched off by the run tool.

Of course, the IP address settings, as well as the actual user name and
password, to access the NETIO-230B power plug, have to be adjusted accordingly.


Automated benchmarking
======================

With the '--target' features added to the run tool, the road is paved to
obtain benchmark results in an automated fashion. Currently, we are most
interested in exploring the network-performance characteristics of Genode.

Network performance can be explored at different levels. We started with
looking at raw driver performance, then looked at the overhead of separating
the network application from the device driver (and thereby introducing
inter-process communication overhead), and finally explored the effects
of the TCP/IP stack.

For pursuing the packet-level performance measurements, we crafted a library
called 'net-stat', which contains the application logic of a low-level
benchmark operating at network-packet level. This library has been
successively incorporated into the 'dde_ipxe' NIC driver and the 'usb_drv'
(NIC driver via ethernet-over-USB) to measure the raw driver performance
without any microkernel overhead or TCP/IP protocol overhead.

To see the influence of the inter-process communication, namely the
packet-stream interface employed by Genode's NIC-session interface,
we implanted the same net-stat library into a NIC-session client. This
experiment enables us to compare the operation of the NIC driver
with the operation of a NIC driver separated from the NIC
application.

The raw networking tests can be executed automatically using the set
of 'network_test_nic*.run' scripts located at 'os/run'.
The scenario sends raw ethernet packets from the host machine to the
target machine. Three tests are provided:
The 'network_test_nic_raw.run' test measures the net-stat-instrumented driver
(of usb_drv and net_drv respectively) to observe the raw receive performance.
The 'network_test_nic_raw_client.run' test implements the benchmark in a
NIC-session client connected to the NIC driver running as a separate
component whereas the NIC driver is not instrumented.
The 'network_test_nic_raw_bridge_client.run' test further adds a NIC bridge
in-between the driver and the NIC-session client.

In addition to analyzing the performance on a low level, we investigated
the effects of TCP/IP for the application performance. This topic is
covered in more detail in Section [TCP/IP performance].


Terminal infrastructure
#######################

Closely related to the quality-assurance measures detailed in the previous
section, there is the arising need to interact with increasingly complex system
scenarios in headless settings. In particular when executing tests remotely on a
development board, manual user-interaction via a GUI
becomes impractical. We vastly prefer a low-bandwidth textual interface
in such situations. But how should a textual user interface for dynamic
systems comprised of many components look like? This is particularly difficult
because most development boards are equipped with merely a single UART
connector.

On a normal Genode system, the UART connector is typically used
by the kernel debugger to print debugging output, or for the interactive
use of a debugger. This leaves no interface for interacting with Genode
components. So how can we expose complex scenarios, such as concurrently
running several instances of Genode subsystems, to the user?
Our solution consists of three parts: A pseudo UART driver for Genode
that uses the kernel debugger as back end, a terminal-multiplexing
facility running on the reference platform, and a command-line based
tool for interacting with Genode. By combining those, the user
can interact with the kernel debugger, a Genode command line, and the
consoles of executed Linux instances over a single serial connection.

The pseudo UART driver called kdb_uart_drv is a Genode service that
implements the 'Uart::Session' interface. Therefore, it can be combined
with all components that use the 'Uart::Session' or the 'Terminal::Session'
interfaces, for example the Noux runtime environment, the terminal_log
service (for displaying LOG messages via the terminal interface), L4Linux, or
programs linked against the 'libc_terminal' plugin. The kdb_uart_drv component
is located at 'os/src/drivers/uart/kdb'. It does not access a real UART device
but rather uses the user-level bindings of the kernel debugger to indirectly
read and write data over the UART interface.

[image kdb_uart_drv 65%]
  The kdb_uart_drv driver used for sharing one UART among the kernel
  debugger, core's LOG service, and a terminal client application
  running on Genode.

Figure [kdb_uart_drv] illustrates the relationship between the kernel
debugger, core's LOG service, and kdb_uart_drv. Because write operations
target the kernel debugger directly, core's LOG service gets bypassed. Output
written to the kdb_uart_drv will directly appear at the terminal program of
the host system. Because kdb_uart_drv has
direct access to the host terminal, it can leverage all facilities of the host
terminal, in particular various escape sequences for terminal manipulations.
For reading from the kernel debugger, there is no way to block for UART input.
Hence, the kdb_uart_drv periodically polls for new input with a period of 20
milliseconds. If new input is available, the driver reads as many characters as
available at once. So the runtime overhead of polling is negligible. To test
kdb_uart_drv as individual component, there is a run script provided at
'os/run/kdb_uart_drv.run'.

Thanks to kdb_uart_drv, both the kernel debugger and Genode can
share one single UART connection. So we have a principal way to let the user
interact with a Genode component that uses the 'Terminal::Session' interface.
However, typical system scenarios should accommodate not just a single program
but multiple Linux instances and native Genode applications simultaneously,
each requiring a dedicated 'Terminal::Session'. Hence, we need a way to
multiplex the 'Terminal::Session' interface between those clients. Our
multiplexing solution comes in the form of a component called terminal_mux,
which we just introduced in the
[https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/13.02#New_terminal_multiplexer - previous release].
It uses a single terminal connection to implement a text-based user interface
to multiple virtual terminal consoles.

[image terminal_mux 40%]
  Operation of the terminal_mux service.

Figure [terminal_mux] depicts the basic functioning of this component. For
terminal_mux clients, the service implements the Linux terminal capabilities.
For doing that, it shares large parts of the implementation of the existing
Genode terminal program. For each client, terminal_mux renders the client
output into a client-specific text-screen buffer. So any number of clients can
perform output on terminal_mux concurrently. According to the selection by
the user, terminal_mux periodically translates one client buffer (the
foreground buffer) to escape sequences as understood by the host terminal. This
translation is performed using the ncurses library. The user can pick the
foreground buffer using an interactive menu that can be activated via the
keyboard shortcut _Control-x_.

By combining kdb_uart_drv with terminal_mux, we created a flexible way
to let the user interact with many Genode applications. The last part
missing for a real dynamic system is a text-based command interface to
start and stop Genode subsystems. This functionality is provided by the
new cli_monitor component located at 'os/src/app/cli_monitor'.
It uses the 'Terminal::Session' interface to present a simple interactive
command line with commands for starting and stopping Genode subsystems,
entering the kernel debugger, and showing status information. It provides
tab completion and inline help to make it easily explorable. The cli_monitor
component is integrated in the scenario of the 'terminal_mux.run' script
mentioned above. Because cli_command is a 'Terminal::Session' client, it can
be interfaced with terminal_mux. This composition is illustrated by Figure
[uart_overview].

[image uart_overview 100%]
  Overview of the terminal infrastructure as employed in the
  demonstration scenario.

Note that in some situations, e.g., when killing subsystems, the kernel, core,
or the init process may print LOG messages. Because those messages are
naturally not routed through terminal_log, they will interfere with the
operation of terminal_mux and thereby result in visible inconsistencies.
Pressing _Control-x_ will clear such artifacts. This will bring up the
terminal_mux menu, which implicitly triggers the redraw of the entire terminal.


Base framework
##############

The current release comes with incremental improvements of the MMIO framework
API and a new utility to ease the synchronized accesses to otherwise
unsynchronized class interfaces.

:MMIO framework improvements:

For native Genode device drivers, we consistently use our
[https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/12.02#MMIO_access_framework - MMIO framework API].
These utilities help us to safeguard the access to individual bit fields of
memory-mapped device registers and cleanly separate the declaration of device
registers from the driver logic. During the increased use of the API, we
observe that the 'Genode::Mmio' class template operates mostly on addresses
that belong to dataspaces provided by core's IO_MEM service. Those dataspaces
are typically obtained via the 'Attached_io_mem_dataspace' convenience class,
which requests the dataspace and attaches it to the local address
space at once. To further reduce repetitive code, we introduced the new
'Attached_mmio' class (located at 'os/attached_mmio.h'), which handles the
common case of making the content of a IO_MEM dataspace available through
register definitions using the 'Mmio' utility. Furthermore, the MMIO framework
API has been enhanced with a variant of the 'Mmio::wait_for()' function that
waits for whole register values rather than bits.

:Synchronized interfaces:

Most Genode programs are multi-threaded, which makes the proper use of locks
inevitable. For most data structures, Genode does not implicitly manage the
locking but expects the user of the data structures to know what he is doing.
This way, we can avoid the locking overhead if a data structure is known to be
accessed by a single thread only. If accessed by multiple threads, we usually
wrap such data structures within an accessor interface that takes care of the
locking. For example, for the 'Allocator' interface, there exists a
corresponding 'Synchronized_allocator' interface wrapper. This technique works
well as long as the number of interfaces is low -- as is the case for Genode's
base API. However, as the wrapper code is for the most part pretty dumb, we'd
like to avoid it. Also, when using the Genode API to implement programs on
top, we do not anticipate manually creating such accessor wrappers. To ease
the creation of synchronized interfaces, we introduced the new
'Synced_interface' class template. It takes a pointer to an existing interface
and a lock as arguments. An instance of a 'Synced_interface' provides
synchronized access to the wrapped interface functions via the 'operator ()'.
Because the 'Synced_interface' does not provide any means to obtain the
unsynchronized version of the interface, once wrapped, the interface cannot be
misused by subsystems that get handed over a reference to a
'Synced_interface'. To see how to employ this utility, please have a look of
how we realize the synchronization within the Vancouver VMM (in particular,
the access to the motherboard).


Low-level OS infrastructure
###########################

TCP/IP performance
==================

On the course of the automated benchmarking described in Section
[Automated quality-assurance testing], we conducted the following steps
to enable benchmarks and to improve performance at the TCP/IP level.

At application level, we desire to compare our network performance with the
performance on GNU/Linux using commodity benchmarks. For this reason, netperf
has been ported to run as native Genode using the lwIP stack. This benchmark
allows us to systematically compare our results with those achieved by Linux.
The port of netperf is available in the ports repository.

In addition to running a commodity benchmark, we pursue synthetic benchmarks
that model the behaviour of typical application scenarios, for example, a
web server that receive many small requests. This is where the added
'test-ping_client' and 'test-ping_server' tests come into play. The test
is located at 'libports/src/test/lwip/pingpong'. It is used by the
series of 'network_test_*.run' scripts located at 'libports/run'. The
run scripts exercise the test in various scenarios and thereby allow us to
systematically explore the impact of the libc and NIC bridge on the
application performance.

# Using raw lwIP without the libc
# Like the first test, but with an instance of the NIC bridge in between the
  test program and the driver.
# Using lwIP with the libc socket bindings
# Like the third test, but with NIC bridge added

To keep track of the lwIP development more closely, we switched to the
Git version of lwIP instead of using a source snapshot.

Furthermore, we incorporated "window scaling" support (RFC 1323) into our
version of lwIP as we identify the TCP window size as a limiting factor
of the TCP throughput achieved via lwIP.


C runtime
=========

We added support for "resolv" functionality to the libc_lwip_nic_dhcp plugin.
Normally, a file called 'resolv.conf' is expected to be located at '/etc'.
On Genode, however, we don't have a global file system, which makes this
way of configuration cumbersome. To ease the provision of a simple default
'resolv.conf' configuration, the plugin hands out the file as a virtual file.
The configuration automatically provides the DNS server address acquired by
lwIP via DHCP. If, for some reason, this policy is not desired, the feature
can be disabled via:

! <libc resolv="no" />

*Note that the configuration of the C runtime has changed*

To foster consistency of the libc configuration, we moved the static
network "interface" attributes into the 'libc' XML node. A new configuration
of static networking would look as follows:

! <libc ip_addr="..." netmask="..." gateway="..." />


Terminal
========

Genode's custom terminal implementation has been improved to better handle
widely used escape sequences.
The new version is able to handle two-argument SGR commands with
attribute/color arguments in any order, and supports the ED, EL0, and
CUB commands.

Because the terminal classes do not rely on any 3rd-party code, they
have been moved to the os repository at 'os/include/terminal'. This way,
we can use those classes by other components of the os repository such
as the new CLI monitor.


FS-LOG service
==============

Using the new FS-LOG service residing at 'libports/os/src/server/fs_log', log
messages of different processes can be redirected to files on a file-system
service. The assignment of processes to files can be expressed in the
configuration as follows:

! <start name="fs_log">
!   <resource name="RAM" quantum="2M"/>
!   <provides><service name="LOG"/></provides>
!   <config>
!     <policy label="noux"    file="/noux.log" />
!     <policy label="noux ->" file="/noux_process.log" />
!   </config>
! </start>

In this example, all messages originating from the noux process are directed
to the file '/noux.log'. All messages originating from children of the noux
process end up in the file '/noux_process.log'.


Liquid FB
=========

Liquid FB is a virtual framebuffer service that uses the nitpicker GUI
server as back end. The virtual framebuffer is presented as a movable
window with a title bar. Until now, we used it primarily for demonstration
purposes, i.e., it is part of Genode's default demo scenario.

Thanks to our forthcoming adaptation of Qt5 to Genode, which requires a
very similar solution to interface Qt5's platform-abstraction layer (QPA) to
Genode, liquid FB got in the spotlight of this release.

First, we took the chance to update its configuration parameters to
become more consistent with similar services such as nit_fb. As liquid_fb was
originally conceived at a time when Genode's XML parser did not support
XML attributes, its configuration syntax used to be a bit arcane. This
has changed now. Apart from this cosmetic refinement, there are two prominent
new features: Support for resizing the framebuffer window with the
mouse and support for dynamic reconfiguration of the virtual framebuffer
via Genode's configuration mechanism.

When the liquid FB window gets resized by the user, the virtual framebuffer
emits a mode-changed signal to its client, which, in turn can handle the
event by re-acquiring the frame-buffer dataspace.

The added support for dynamic reconfiguration allows for changing the
properties of a liquid FB instance via Genode's configuration mechanism.
For example, the window position and size can be manipulated this way.

Furthermore, two new configuration options have been added. The
'resize_handle' option shows or hides the resize handle widget at the
lower-right window corner (by default, it is hidden). The 'decoration' option
defines whether window decorations should be visible (default is yes). Both
options can have the values "on" or "off".


3rd-party libraries
###################

The following 3rd-party libraries have been added or updated:

* To complement libSDL, we have added ports of SDL_ttf, SDL_image,
  SDL_image, SDL_mixer, and SDL_loadso. Those additions to libSDL
  are used by popular libSDL-based applications such as Tuxpaint.
  They are now available at the libports repository.

* GNU FriBidi 0.19.5 added to the libports repository

* Qt4 updated to version 4.8.4

* zlib updated to version 1.2.8


Device drivers
##############

Unified driver names
====================

The growing diversity of supported hardware platforms calls for improved
conventions of how to name device drivers. Otherwise, run scripts that are
meant to support a wide range of platforms will eventually become more
and more complicated due to platform-dependent conditional configuration
snippets. For example, the default framebuffer drivers of the respective
platforms used to be called "vesa_drv" (for x86), "omap4_fb_drv", or "pl11x_drv".
In order to support the different platforms, run scripts that were otherwise
platform-agnostic had to explicitly deal with those differences.

To solve this issue, we introduced a generic SPEC values for device types, for
which a default driver is expected to exist. If a platform features a
framebuffer driver, it includes the SPEC value "framebuffer". On each
platform, the default driver for the respective device has the same name. So
each of "vesa_drv", "pl11x_drv", and "omap4_fb_drv" had been renamed to
"fb_drv". This is possible because the use of those drivers is mutually
exclusive.

The same convention has been applied to GPIO drivers as well. The
corresponding SPEC value is called "gpio". The driver binaries are called
"gpio_drv".


ATAPI
=====

LBA48 support has been added to the ATAPI driver. Thanks to Ivan Loskutov!


KDB UART driver for L4/Fiasco and Fiasco.OC
===========================================

The new KDB UART driver at 'os/src/drivera/uart/kdb' uses the kernel debugger
console as backend for input and output. This is useful in the case that only
one UART is available as described in Section [Terminal infrastructure].
Examples for using the kdb_uart_drv are available in the form of the run scripts
'ports-foc/run/l4linux.run' and 'os/run/kdb_uart_drv.run'.


Revised GPIO session interface
==============================

The original design of the GPIO session interface enabled the client of a
single session to interact with any number GPIO pins. Each function of the
interface took a GPIO number as first argument, which addressed the GPIO pin.

To simplify the interface and to enable fine-grained GPIO-assignment policies,
the interface has been changed to provide access to a single GPIO pin per
session only. At session creation time, the client specifies a single GPIO
pin, to which the session refers. This information can be evaluated for the
session routing. So access-control policies can be easily implemented per GPIO
pin. The server stores the pin as part of the session context and implicitly
uses the pin for operations on the session interface.

Furthermore, a generic driver interface for GPIO-class-device drivers
has been introduced. The new interface at 'os/include/gpio' alleviates the
need to implement the boilerplate code to interface the driver with Genode.
The existing GPIO drivers for OMAP4 and i.MX53 are the first beneficiaries of
these changes.


Exynos 5 SoC
============

After principally enabling the Exynos 5 SoC platform in the previous
release, we moved on with extending the device-driver coverage of this SoC. In
particular, we addressed USB networking, XHCI (USB-3), Gigabit networking over
USB-3, eMMC, and SATA.

The development of those device drivers follows our rationale that guided our
[https://genode.org/documentation/articles/pandaboard - previous work on the OMAP4 platform].
For the USB driver, we employed the device-driver-environment (DDE) approach
for reusing the Linux USB stack and the host controller drivers. In contrast,
the eMMC and SATA drivers are built as genuine Genode drivers with no
3rd-party code used.

Technically, the addition of Exynos-5 support to our USB driver was
an evolutionary step. It required us to add the corresponding EHCI
controller and to supply a few additions to the device-driver
environment. To simplify the driver, we decided to let the driver
rely on the platform initialization as performed by the U-Boot boot
loader. Since the initialization is performed during the boot process
already, there is no need to do this work twice. Because the platforms
supported by the USB driver become more and more diverse, we re-organized the
internal structure of the 'dde_linux' repository to keep those platforms well
separated. Furthermore, we reworked the memory management of the USB driver to
improve the utilization of the available RAM. The new solution employs Genode's
concept of managed dataspaces to manage a part of the local address-space
layout manually. This helps us to implement a fast translation of driver-local
virtual addresses to physical addresses as needed for issuing DMA requests.

The eMMC driver builds upon our protocol implementation for the SD-card
protocol, which was originally developed for the OMAP4 SD-card driver.
Because we kept the SD-card protocol implementation well separated
from the host-controller driver, it was possible to leverage parts of our
existing work for the eMMC driver. Because the eMMC protocol is an extension
of the SD-card protocol, however, we needed to enhance the protocol
implementation accordingly. The extension comprises support for the
MMC_SEND_EXT_CSD, MMC_SEND_OP_COND, and STOP_TRANSMISSION commands as well as
the MMC detection. The host controller driver was implemented from scratch
with the help of I/O access traces gathered from instrumenting the U-Boot boot
loader and the Linux kernel. The driver operates the eMMC in high-speed, 8-bit
mode at 52 MHz using DMA. The implementation can be found at
'os/src/drivers/sd_card/exynos5'.

The initial version of our new SATA driver for Exynos 5 has been implemented
from the ground up. Even though it is at an early stage, it has been
successfully tested with a UDMA-133 disk, e.g., our generic block test
is passed and the disk can be attached as a block device to an instance of
L4Linux.


Freescale i.MX SoC
==================

The support for the Freescale i.MX53 SoC has been extended by a number of
devices. All drivers reside in the os repository under the 'os/src/drivers'
subdirectory.

The general-purpose I/O (GPIO) driver located at 'gpio/imx53' implements the
revised GPIO-session interface.

The i.MX53 input driver provides support for the input devices featured on the
i.MX53 SABRE tablet. The tablet uses an Egalaxy touchscreen and Freescale's
MPR121 capacitative touch buttons. Both are supported by the new driver. The
driver is located at 'input/imx53'.

The new framebuffer driver for the i.MX53 quick-start board (QSB) as well as
the SABRE tablet comes with special support for using the
hardware overlay feature provided by the i.MX53 image processing unit (IPU)
Access to the overlay is implemented via an IPU-specific extension
of the framebuffer-session interface. To combine the driver well with
nitpicker using alpha-channels, optional support for double-buffering
is provided. The driver is located at 'framebuffer/imx53'.

As an abstraction of platform features that need to be accessed by
multiple drivers, a so-called platform driver has been introduced.
The platform driver safeguards the access to global resources such
as clocks and system-configuration bits. It can be found at 'platform/imx53'.


OMAP4 SoC
=========

The OMAP4 framebuffer driver used to support HDMI only, which was used
for connecting a display to the Pandaboard. To make the driver usable on
phones and tablets, the driver has been enhanced to support LCD output. Thanks
to Alexander Tarasikov for the patch and the insightful story about
[https://allsoftwaresucks.blogspot.com/2013/05/porting-genode-to-commercial-hardware.html - porting Genode to the B&N Nook HD+ tablet]!


USB
===

The USB driver of the 'dde_linux' repository has received substantial
improvements both feature-wise and under the hood.

First and foremost, the Linux device-driver environment, on which the
driver is based on, has been updated from kernel version 3.2 to version
3.9 as the latter version includes drivers for recent host controllers
such as DWC3 out of the box.

DWC3 is the host controller employed on the Exynos-5-based
Arndale platform for USB 3. We added the support needed to operate this
controller in XHCI mode and added support for Gigabit networking through
the ASIX AX88179 Gigabit-Ethernet Adapter as well as USB storage support.

Apart from extending the device-driver coverage, we revised the driver
internally. The back-end allocators for DMA buffers and normal memory have been
rewritten to allocate RAM more sparingly. Furthermore, we enabled the USB
driver for 64-bit x86 machines and improved the support for HID keyboards,
including the application of quirks to cherry keyboards.

*Note the change of the USB configuration*

With the addition of XHCI, the USB driver supports a growing number
of host controllers. In some situations, it is desirable to constrain the
driver to a subset of controllers only. For example, on the Arndale platform,
we desire to use a dedicated USB stack for XHCI, which operates completely
independent from the USB stack accessing USB-2. This way, gigabit networking
over USB-3 won't interfere with the operation of USB-2. To make this
possible, we added new configuration options to the USB driver.
With the new scheme, host controllers must be explicitly enabled in the
configuration. Supported config attributes are: 'uhci', 'ehci', and 'xhci'.
For example, a configuration snippet to enable UHCI and EHCI looks as
follows:
! <config uhci="yes" ehci="yes">


Updated iPXE device-driver environment
======================================

The iPXE device-driver environment was update to the most recent
iPXE upstream Git version in order to benefit from upstream improvements
of the Intel E1000 NIC driver.


Runtime environments
####################

Vancouver VMM on NOVA
=====================

Vancouver is the user-level virtual-machine monitor that accompanies the
NOVA hypervisor for hosting unmodified guest operating systems.

The most active line of development is led by Julian Stecklina at TU Dresden
via a fork called Seoul. In contrast to the original version of Vancouver,
this fork is open for outside contributions. Hence, it represents an ideal
platform for those parties with a stake in Vancouver to collaborate, i.e.,
the NUL userland, the NOVA runtime environment of TUD, and Genode.

In the current state of the transition, the Hip structure from Genode
is reused. String functions, which were formerly taken from NUL are now
provided by a stripped-down version of the C library called
'seoul_libc_support'. The nul/config.h is replaced by just using a constant
value in the one place where the file was needed.

The Genode-specific back ends of Vancouver, as largely introduced with the
previous Genode release, have been improved in several respects:

* CPUID 0x40000000: This instruction is issued by Linux when the KVM
  guest support is compiled in. We have to return deterministic values to let
  the Linux kernel survive.

* Replaced busy thread startup synchronization by proper locking.

* New locking scheme: We replaced the error-prone manual locking with the
  use of the freshly introduced 'Synced_interface' for the motherboard and the
  VCPU dispatcher. Also, all globally visible locks have been removed. They are
  explicitly passed to subsystems only when needed.

* Improved PS/2 mouse back-end:
  The previous version of the PS/2 mouse back end managed mouse-motion
  events in a strange way, effectively throwing away most information
  about the motion vector. Furthermore, the tracking of the mouse-button
  states were missing. So drag-and-drop in a guest OS won't work. The new
  version fixes those issues. For the transformation of input events to
  PS/2 packets, the 'Genode::Register' facility is used, which greatly
  simplifies the code.


L4Linux on Fiasco.OC
====================

We improved the memory management of L4Linux on Genode in two ways.
The first improvement is concerned about the upper limit of memory per Linux
instance. The corresponding discussion can be found at
[https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/issues/414 - issue #414].
We changed our L4Re emulation library to match the semantics of the original
L4Re more closely. Furthermore, we removed a heuristic in the L4Linux kernel,
which assumed that all kernel-local addresses above 0x8000000 refer to device
resources. In our version of L4Linux, there exist no MMIO resources. In
contrary, the virtual addresses above this addresses are used for normal
memory. By removing this artificial restriction with regard to the virtual
memory layout of the L4Linux kernel, we can host a larger kernel memory area.

The second improvement is concerned with the allocation of L4Linux
memory at Genode's core. Until now, L4Linux used to allocate its memory
as one contiguous RAM dataspace at core's RAM service. Core tries to
naturally align the allocation to improve the likelihood for large-page
mappings. So a dataspace is likely to be physically located at a
power-of-two boundary larger or equal than the dataspace size. For example,
the allocation of a 100 MiB RAM dataspace for a Linux instance will
be located at a 128 MiB boundary. If multiple of such allocations happen
sub-sequentially, this allocation strategy results in 28 MiB gaps between
100 MiB dataspaces. This memory cannot be used for large contiguous
allocations anymore. So even if the available memory capacity is far
larger than 100 MiB, an allocation of a 100 MiB block may fail.
To relieve this problem, we weakened the requirement for contiguous memory
by assembling L4Linux memory from multiple chunks of small dataspaces.
For example, by using a chunk size of 16 MiB, core's best-fit allocator
will have a better chance to find a more suited position for allocation
when aligning the block to a 16 MiB boundary compared to the allocation
of a larger block. Furthermore, slack memory can be used more efficiently
because smaller gaps (such as a 20 MiB gap) remain to be usable for L4Linux.
The discussion of this topic and the individual patch can be found at
[https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/issues/695 - issue #695].

Furthermore, the L4Linux block driver has been improved to support large
partitions.


Platforms
#########

Execution on bare hardware (base-hw)
====================================

Raspberry Pi
~~~~~~~~~~~~

Principal support for the Raspberry Pi platform has been added to the base-hw
kernel. The popular Raspberry Pi board is based on an ARMv6 Broadcom BCM2835
SoC. The current scope of the platform support comprises:

* IRQ controller driver: Because the interrupt controller uses a cascade of
  registers, we settled on the following IRQ enumeration scheme.
  IRQ numbers 0..7 refer to the basic IRQs.
  IRQ numbers 8..39 refer to GPU IRQs  0..31.
  IRQ numbers 40..71 refer to GPU IRQs 32..63.

* The kernel employs the so-called system timer for the preemptive scheduling.

* Core's LOG messages are printed over the PL011-based UART.

* The user-level timer driver uses the so-called ARM timer, which is a
  slightly modified SP804 timer device.

Up to this point, a few device driver are missing to use Genode on the
Raspberry Pi in practice, most notably USB.

To build and run Genode on the Raspberry Pi, create a new build directory
via the 'create_builddir' tool, specifying 'hw_rpi' as platform.


User-level timer driver for Arndale platform
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

By adding our new Exynos 5250 PWM timer driver, the base-hw kernel can now
be used for executing meaningful scenarios on the Arndale board including
the USB stack and networking.


Linux
=====

Until now, Genode on Linux supported x86-based platforms only.
The newly added 'linux_arm' platform clears the way to run Genode directly on
Linux-based ARM platforms. Genode's entire software stack is supported,
including the dynamic linker, graphical applications, and Qt4.

As a known limitations, the libc 'setjmp()'/'longjmp()' doesn't currently
save/restore floating point registers.


Build system and tools
######################

The run tool has been enhanced as detailed in Section
[Automated quality-assurance testing].

