genode/doc/release_notes-16-11.txt

              ===============================================
              Release notes for the Genode OS Framework 16.11
              ===============================================

                               Genode Labs



In contrast to most parts of the framework, the fundamental low-level
protocols, which define the interaction between parent and child components
have remained unchanged since the very first Genode version. From this
interplay, the entire architecture follows. That said, certain initial design
choices were not perfect. They partially resulted from limitations of the
kernels we used during Genode's early years and from our pre-occupation with a
certain style of programming. Over the years, the drawbacks inherent in our
original design became more and more clear and we drafted rough plans to
overcome them. However, reworking the fundamental protocols of a system that
already accommodates hundreds of component implementations cannot be taken
light-handily. Because of this discomfort, we repeatedly deferred the topic -
until now. With the rapidly growing workloads carried by Genode, we
deliberately decided to address long-standing deficiencies rather than adding
the features we originally planned according to the
[https://genode.org/about/road-map - road map].

Section [Asynchronous parent-child interactions] presents the reworking of
Genode's component interplay at the lowest level. With this change in place,
we feel much more comfortable to scale up our workloads in the upcoming
releases.

Functionality-wise, the most prominent topic of the current release is the
vastly improved NIC-routing component. Since we introduced the first version
of the NIC router in the previous release, we took an iterative approach to
shape the component according to its most prominent use cases. Section
[Further improved virtual networking] summarizes the changes and the
motivation behind them.

Even though we added support for seL4 in the previous release, the NOVA
hypervisor is still our go-to kernel for x86-based hardware because of its
feature set. For this reason, we continuously improve this kernel and the
NOVA-specific components like VirtualBox. Section [NOVA hypervisor] covers
the introduction of an asynchronous map operation to NOVA.

Further topics of the current release range from added smart-card support,
over a new timeout API, to a VFS-based time-based password generator. With
respect to the road map, we postponed most topics originally planned. In
particular, we intended to enable the use of Genode on top of Xen by following
With respect to the road map, we postponed most topics originally planned for
this release. Originally, we intended to enable the use of Genode on top of
Xen by following the footsteps of the existing Muen support - using our custom
base-hw kernel within a Xen DomU domain. However, before proceeding this
route, we decided to modernize the kernel design, in particular with respect
to bootstrapping and address-space management. Some parts of this line of work
are already present in the current release, for example the unification of the
boot-module handling as explained in Section
[Unified handling of boot modules].


Asynchronous parent-child interactions
######################################

When Genode was born in 2006, the L4 microkernels of the time universally
lacked an asynchronous inter-process-communication (IPC) mechanism.
Consequently, we designed the first version of Genode with the presumption
that components had to interact solely synchronously. To us, this seemed to be
the "right" way because the synchronous low-footprint IPC was presumably the
key for L4's good performance. It felt natural to leverage this benefit to the
maximum extent possible.

To illustrate the implications of this line of thinking for Genode, let's take
a look at a simple scenario where a parent component hosts two children and one
child provides a service to the other child.

[image simple_scenario]

During the creation of a session, the kernel's IPC mechanism serves three
purposes. First, it is used to communicate information between different
protection domains, in this case the parent, the client, and the server.
Second, it implicitly dictates the flow of control between the involved
parties because the caller blocks until the callee replies to the IPC call.
Third, the IPC is the mechanism to delegate authority (like the authority to
access the server's session object) between protection domains. The latter is
realized with the kernel's ability to carry capabilities as IPC message
payload. If this sounds a bit too abstract, please consider reviewing Section
3.1. "Capability-based security" of the
[https://genode.org/documentation/genode-foundations-16-05.pdf - Genode Foundations].
Using solely a synchronous IPC mechanism, the sequence of establishing a
session in the given scenario is as follows. In the context of Genode,
we usually refer to synchronous IPC as RPC (remote procedure call).

[image sync_session_seq]

The sequence looks straightforward:

# The client issues an RPC call to its parent, requesting a session for a
  service of the given type while also  passing a number of session-construction
  arguments along with the request.
# Given the service name as provided with the session request, the parent
  determines the server to ask for a new session. It requests a session
  on behalf of the client by performing an RPC call to the server's prior
  registered "root" capability. This capability refers to an interface for
  creating and closing sessions.
# The server responds to the invocation of its root interface by creating
  a new session object along with a session capability.
  Whereas the session object is local to the server, the corresponding
  session capability can be passed (delegated) to other components.
  Each component in possession of the session capability is able to interact
  with the server's corresponding session object via RPC calls.
  The server returns the session capability to the parent as the result of the
  parent's RPC call.
# The parent forwards the session capability to the client as the result of
  the client's original RPC call.

Even though the simplicity of this protocol seems nice, it has inherent
limitations:

First, as the parent performs a synchronous RPC call to the server on behalf
of the client, it must trust the server to eventually respond to the RPC call.
If the server doesn't, the parent may block forever. In contrast to the client
that actually uses the service and thereby relies on the liveliness of the
server, the parent should not need to trust the server to be responsive. To
deal with the risk of an unresponsive server, Genode's existing runtime
environments (like the init component), maintain a dedicated thread for each
child. The session requests originating from a child are handled by the
corresponding parent-local child thread. In the worst case - if the server
fails to respond - only a single child thread stays blocked but the other
parts of the runtime environment remain unaffected. Consequently, runtime
environments have to be multi-threaded components. This, in turn, comes at the
cost of added complexity, in particular the need for error-prone inter-thread
synchronization.

Second, the approach keeps the parent's state implicitly stored in the stacks
of the parent's threads. This becomes a problem in dynamic runtime
environments that need to kill subsystems at arbitrary times. E.g., imagine
the situation where the client component is to be destroyed while the parent's
call to the server's root interface is still pending. The safe destruction of
the child - including its associated parent-local child thread - requires the
parent to abort the RPC call, which is a complex and - again - error-prone
operation.

Third, even though not inherent to synchronous RPC, Genode's original design
facilitated the use of a session capability as argument for requesting the
parent to close a specific session. However, the use of capabilities as
re-identifiable tokens is not well supported by most kernels, including seL4
([http://sel4.systems/pipermail/devel/2014-November/000114.html - discussion]
on the seL4 mailing list).


Asynchronous communication throughout Genode
--------------------------------------------

In 2008, we acknowledged the sole reliance on synchronous RPC as too limiting
and introduced an
[https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/8.11#Asynchronous_notifications - API for asynchronous notifications].
On the traditional L4 kernels, we implemented the API by using Genode's
core component as a proxy for signal delivery. The use of asynchronous
notifications soon became natural and wide-spread throughout Genode. Today,
most session interfaces combine three forms of inter-component communication,
namely synchronous RPC calls, asynchronous notifications, and shared memory.
The new Genode API introduced in
[https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/16.05#The_great_API_renovation - version 16.05]
further cultivated the modeling of Genode components as single-threaded state
machines instead of multi-threaded programs.

Still, until now, the most fundamental mechanism of Genode - the protocol
between parent and child components - has remained synchronous. The reasons
are twofold. First, our workaround for realizing runtime environments in a
multi-threaded way worked too well. So we were not constantly bothered by this
design problem. Second and more importantly, redesigning the fundamental
mechanism of the framework while not breaking the more than 300 existing
components is quite scary. But in anticipation to the rapidly scaling
workloads imposed on Genode, we had to take on the problem sooner or later.
We figured that now - with the modernized framework API in place - it's the
right time. From redesigning the interplay of parent and child components, we
will become able to create single-threaded runtime environments that behave
completely deterministically while consuming less resources than
multi-threaded programs. By the explicit enumeration of possible states, we
greatly ease the validation/evaluation of such crucial components.


New session-creation procedure
------------------------------

Following the asynchronous approach, the sequence of creating a session now
looks as follows:

[image async_session_seq]

The dotted lines are asynchronous notifications, which have fire-and-forget
semantics. A component that triggers a signal does not block.

The following points are worth noting:

* Sessions are identified via IDs, which are plain numbers as opposed to
  capabilities. The IDs as seen by the client and server belong to different
  ID name spaces.
  IDs of sessions requested by the client are allocated by the client. IDs
  of sessions requested at the server are allocated by the parent.
* The parent does no longer need to perform RPC calls to any of its children.
  Hence, the need for multiple threads in runtime environments disappears.
* Each activation of the parent merely applies a state change of the session's
  meta data structures maintained at the parent, which capture the entire
  state of session requests. There is no hidden state stored on the parent's
  stack.
* The information about pending session requests is communicated from the
  parent to the server via a ROM session. At startup, the server requests
  a ROM session for the ROM module "session_requests" from its parent. The
  parent implements this ROM session locally. Since ROM sessions support
  versions, the parent can post version updates of the "session_requests"
  ROM with the regular mechanisms already present in Genode.
* The involved parties can potentially run in parallel.


Outcome and current state
-------------------------

Intuitively, the sequence of steps required to establish a session has
become more complicated. However, for the users of the framework, the entire
procedure is completely transparent. With a few tricks, we were actually able
to implement this fundamental change while keeping almost all existing
components untouched. One trick is the introduction of a server-local proxy
mechanism, which translates the requests obtained from the "session_requests"
ROM to component-local RPC calls on the server's root interface. So from the
perspective of an existing server component, a session request still looks
like a synchronous RPC request from the outside. Of course, the proxy is meant
as an intermediate solution until we have crafted a convenient front-end API
for the asynchronous mode of operation.

Even though the biggest share of components remains unaffected by the change,
this is not true for all components. In particular, runtime environments had
to be reworked, in some cases quite fundamentally. These include core, init,
noux, the loader, GDB monitor, launcher, CLI monitor, and the platform driver.
The change does not only affect the interplay between components but also
required a reconsideration of the child-creation procedure.

Besides the architectural improvement, this line of work had two welcome
effects.

First, in contrast to the original design, which relied on capabilities as
re-identifiable tokens, the new version greatly alleviates the need for
re-identifying capabilities on seL4. So we are able to eliminate a
long-standing problem with Genode on this kernel.

Second, the work called for new data structures for the safe interaction with
ID spaces (_base/id_space.h_) and object registries (_base/registry.h_). Those
data structures will possibly be useful in a lot of places that currently use
plain (and fairly unsafe) AVL trees or lists.

At the API level, the change is almost transparent to regular components,
except for two details. The upgrading of session quota is no longer
possible by a mere RPC call to the parent. Instead, 'Connection' objects
received a new 'upgrade_ram' method that must be used instead. Speaking
of 'Connection' objects, we had to remove the (fairly obscure) 'KEEP_OPEN'
feature, which is conceptually incompatible with the new design.


Further improved virtual networking
###################################

The
[https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/16.08#Virtual_networking_and_support_for_TOR - previous release]
introduced the NIC router - a component that individually routes IP
packets between multiple NIC sessions, translates between different IP
subnets, and also supports port forwarding and NAT. For the first version of
the NIC router, we focused on the technical realization. Now, besides
some optimization and restructuring, we took the chance to polish the
configuration interface of the component. The goal was to make the interface
more intuitive and reduce pitfalls to a minimum. Roughly speaking, the
handling of the NIC router became more tailored to its/our typical use cases.

Let's create a practical setup to explain the changes in detail. Assume that
there are two virtual subnets 192.168.1.0/24 and 192.168.2.0/24 within our
Genode system. They connect as Virtnet A and B to the router. The standard
gateway of the virtual networks is the NIC router with IP 192.168.*.1 . The
router's uplink, on the other hand, is connected to the NIC driver. It
interfaces the machine with our real-world home network 10.0.2.0/24. The home
network is connected to the internet through its standard gateway 10.0.2.1.

[image nic_router_basic]

The basic router configuration for this setup without any routing rules would
be as follows:

! <policy label_prefix="virtnet_a" domain="virtnet_a" />
! <policy label_prefix="virtnet_b" domain="virtnet_b" />
!
! <domain name="uplink"    interface="10.0.2.55/24"   gateway="10.0.2.1" />
! <domain name="virtnet_a" interface="192.168.1.1/24" />
! <domain name="virtnet_b" interface="192.168.2.1/24" />

The first thing to notice is the changed usage of the policy tag. Previously,
the policy label - normally solely designated to correlate sessions with
configuration domains - was misused also as unique peer identifier in the
routing rules. This approach disregarded advanced label-matching techniques
such as the 'label_prefix' used above. Now, the whole NIC-router-specific
enhancement of the policy tag moved to the new '<domain>' tag, leaving the
policy tag only with its original purpose to select policies. Note that even
if this modification gives the impression, the router is not yet capable of
handling multiple NIC sessions at one domain at a time.

In the domain tag, the 'interface' attribute replaces the old policy attribute
named 'src'. That means, it tells the router which IP identity to use when
talking as itself to the domain. But in addition to that, the 'interface'
attribute also defines which subnet this identity and the domain belong to.
This reflects a basic decision we made during the reworking process: The new
NIC router is aware of subnets. Sessions of the same subnet have the same
configuration domain. We came to this conclusion as it solves some fundamental
problems with the old version. First, the equivalence of domain and subnet
enables us to link a default gateway to a subnet by adding the 'gateway'
attribute to the domain tag. In our example, this is done in the uplink
domain. The 'gateway' attribute is optional for a domain and replaces the
former 'via' attributes of the different routing rules. It is more efficient
and natural to have this value set only once at the corresponding subnet than
having it scattered all over the routing rules of the remote domains as done
before. If a domain has no default gateway, it drops all packets with a
foreign recipient.

The second advantage of a domain being equivalent to a subnet is that handling
ARP broadcasts becomes easy. It can be excluded that such ARP broadcasts
concern sessions outside the source domain anymore. And as sessions in the
same domain are not distinguishable to the routing, the broadcast can be sent
to all of them without breaking any rules.

Now, let's enhance our example by some routing rules. One pretty complicated
thing to do with the old NIC router was port forwarding. You had to combine
different routing rules, explicitly enable the back routing at the remote
side, and take care that NAT was applied - a lot of opportunities for
mistakes. With the new version, it became easier. Let's assume we have an HTTP
server in Virtnet A and an NTP server in Virtnet B. We want the NIC router to
act as proxy for their services in our home network.

[image nic_router_servers]

In order to achieve this, the uplink domain must be enhanced by two rules:

! <policy label_prefix="virtnet_a" domain="virtnet_a" />
! <policy label_prefix="virtnet_b" domain="virtnet_b" />
!
! <domain name="uplink" interface="10.0.2.55/24" gateway="10.0.2.1" />
!    <tcp-forward port="443" domain="virtnet_a" to="192.168.1.2" />
!    <udp-forward port="123" domain="virtnet_b" to="192.168.2.2" />
! </domain>
!
! <domain name="virtnet_a" interface="192.168.1.1/24" />
! <domain name="virtnet_b" interface="192.168.2.1/24" />

The TCP forwarding rule for port 443 (HTTP+TLS/SSL) redirects to IP address
192.168.1.2 in Virtnet A and the UDP forwarding rule for port 123 (NTP)
redirects to IP address 192.168.2.2 in Virtnet B. The Virtnet domains remain
empty as the router keeps track of the redirected transfers and routes back
reply packets automatically. Also automatically, the router applies NAT for the
server as it is in the nature of port forwarding.

Next, we add some clients to Virtnet B that like to talk to our home network
and the internet. We want them to be hidden via NAT when they do so. For
internet communication, they shall furthermore be limited to HTTP+TLS/SSL and
IMAP+TLS/SSL.

[image nic_router_client]

This is what the router configuration looks now:

! <policy label_prefix="virtnet_a" domain="virtnet_a" />
! <policy label_prefix="virtnet_b" domain="virtnet_b" />
!
! <domain name="uplink" interface="10.0.2.55/24" gateway="10.0.2.1" />
!    <tcp-forward port="443" domain="virtnet_a" to="192.168.1.2" />
!    <udp-forward port="123" domain="virtnet_b" to="192.168.2.2" />
!    <nat domain="virtnet_b" tcp-ports="1000" udp-ports="1000">
! </domain>
!
! <domain name="virtnet_a" interface="192.168.1.1/24" />
! <domain name="virtnet_b" interface="192.168.2.1/24"  >
!    <tcp dst="10.0.2.0/24"> <permit-any domain="uplink" /> </tcp>
!    <udp dst="10.0.2.0/24"> <permit-any domain="uplink" /> </udp>
!    <tcp dst="0.0.0.0/0">
!       <permit port="443" domain="uplink" />
!       <permit port="993" domain="uplink" />
!    </tcp>
! </domain>

There are several new tag types. One of them is the NAT configuration for
Virtnet B in the uplink domain. In contrast to the former NIC-router version
where NAT settings were part of the source domain, NAT is now configured in
the target domain with a sub-tag for each source. This has the advantage
of supporting heterogeneous NAT configurations for a packet source depending
on which domain it talks to. Besides, it is more intuitive to read. Apart from
that, the NAT settings haven't changed.

Furthermore, there are the new TCP and UDP tags in the Virtnet-B domain. The
first two of them have a 'permit-any' sub-tag. With this combination, we open
all ports to IP addresses of the 10.0.2.0/24 subnet, our home network, and
route them to the uplink domain. TCP packets that don't match these first two
rules may fall back to the third. This TCP rule doesn't have all ports opened
but only 443 (HTTP+TLS/SSL) and 993 (IMAP+TLS/SSL). Both ports are again bound
to the uplink domain. As the IP filter 0.0.0.0/0 of the surrounding rule isn't
restrictive, we now also route packets to a foreign destination. The NIC
router redirects such packets to the default gateway of our home network.

Compared to the old router version where IP and UDP/TCP routing had to be
combined for this purpose, the new TCP and UDP rules with their
port-permission sub-rules have some notable advantages. Like port-forwarding
rules, TCP and UDP rules always imply link-state tracking in order to route
back reply packets automatically. This can be seen also in our example as no
further routing rules had to be added to the uplink domain. This aspect is
clear from the outermost rule and not dependent on sub-rules anymore.
Furthermore, the strict separation of UDP and TCP routing prevents
configuration faults and increases readability. Last but not least, the
'permit-any' rule allows something new. Opening all ports for an address range
was previously only possible without link-state tracking as it could be
expressed only on the IP level.

At this point, we have thoroughly discussed the layer-3 routing abilities of
the new NIC router and our focus has indeed moved more into this direction.
Even though IP routing is still available, we found that it should be more
clearly separated from the rest. To illustrate this feature, we enhance our
example again. We want the Virtnets to be allowed to communicate to each other
without any restrictions. For that purpose, we add two more rules to the
router configuration:

! <policy label_prefix="virtnet_a" domain="virtnet_a" />
! <policy label_prefix="virtnet_b" domain="virtnet_b" />
!
! <domain name="uplink" interface="10.0.2.55/24" gateway="10.0.2.1" />
!    <tcp-forward port="443" domain="virtnet_a" to="192.168.1.2" />
!    <udp-forward port="123" domain="virtnet_b" to="192.168.2.2" />
!    <nat domain="virtnet_b" tcp-ports="1000" udp-ports="1000">
! </domain>
!
! <domain name="virtnet_a" interface="192.168.1.1/24" />
!    <ip dst="192.168.2.0/24" domain="virtnet_b"/>
! </domain>
!
! <domain name="virtnet_b" interface="192.168.2.1/24"  >
!    <tcp dst="10.0.2.0/24"> <permit-any domain="uplink" /> </tcp>
!    <udp dst="10.0.2.0/24"> <permit-any domain="uplink" /> </udp>
!    <tcp dst="0.0.0.0/0">
!       <permit port="443" domain="uplink" />
!       <permit port="993" domain="uplink" />
!    </tcp>
!    <ip dst="192.168.1.0/24" domain="virtnet_a"/>
! </domain>

As you can see, each of the new IP rules in the Virtnet domains match the
addresses of the opposite subnet and route to the corresponding domain. As
mentioned, the new IP rules and UDP/TCP rules are not combined anymore to
clearly distinguish IP routing from layer-3 routing because this decision has
far-reaching effects. First, in contrast to UDP and TCP routing, IP routing is
stateless. Thus, for each IP routing rule one has to be sure to have a
back-routing rule at the remote domain or else bidirectional communication
won't happen. And second, NAT does not apply to IP-routed packets. So, if
you're not aware of such packets, you may unintentionally reveal information
about a private network.

For more details on the new NIC router, you may refer to the comprehensive
documentation in the _repos/os/src/server/nic_router/README_ file and the
basic NIC-router test at _libports/run/nic_router.run_ .


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

Improved RPC mechanism
======================

Since we introduced Genode's current API for synchronous RPCs in
[https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/11.05#New_API_for_type-safe_inter-process_communication - version 11.05],
inter-component communication within Genode has become almost a child's play.
The RPC framework leverages the C++ type system and templates to a great
effect. In contrast to the traditional use of IDL compilers, the interaction
with RPC objects provided by other components is robust and natural because
no language boundaries need to be crossed.

Still, a few differences between RPC calls and regular function calls remain.
In particular, there exist a few restrictions with regard to the types of
RPC function arguments. Those types did not just need to be POD (plain old
data) types but they had to be default-constructible, too. Whereas the former
restriction still applies (non-POD objects that include references or
vtables cannot be used as arguments), the latter limitation has been lifted
now. Generally, non-default-constructible types are a way to attain
simpler code because the special case of an "invalid" object does not need
to be considered. I.e., values of such types can be kept as constants as
opposed to variables. If an object exists (as equivalent to successful
instantiation), it is valid. With the improved RPC mechanism, the RPC
framework does no longer stay in the way in this respect.

Thanks to Edgard Schmidt for this welcome contribution!


Unification and tightening of session labels
============================================

In Genode, each session requested by a client component is labeled according
to the components that intermediate the session request. The client can
optionally specify a label of choice along with the session request. Its
parent prefixes the client-provided label by a label of its own. If the
session request is further passed to the parent's parent, the grandparent
prepends its own label. This works recursively. Consequently, the final label
as seen by the server is the product of the labeling policies of all
components on the route of the session request.

The label is used for two purposes. First, the server uses the label as
a key for a server-side policy selection. E.g., depending on the session label
received by the disk-partition server, the server decides which partition to
hand out to the client. Second, the label is used by intermediate components
to take session-routing decisions. E.g., based on the label of a file-system
session request, a parent component may route the request to one of several
file-system servers.

Originally, Genode did not impose a specific way of how labels are formed.
It was up to each intermediate component to filter the label of a session
request in any way desired. However, in practice, this freedom remained unused
and the very simple successive prefixing of labels prevails in all our use
cases. Each intermediate node concatenates its own label in front of the label
supplied by the originator of the session request. The different parts of the
label are separated with the character sequence '" -> "'. Some corner cases
were handles specially for aesthetic reasons. For example, if a client
provided no label, the parent would skip the pending separator. That said,
since each intermediate component had to provide the labeling policy, not all
components were consistent in these respects. Since we found no use for
arbitrary labeling policies, we decided to make the only prominent way of
session labeling mandatory for all intermediate components. We thereby removed
the aesthetically motivated corner cases and possible ambiguities. I.e., with
the original policy, it was not possible to distinguish a unlabeled session
requested by a client from a labeled session requested by the client's parent.

As a consequence, the stricter labeling must now be considered wherever
a precise label was specified as a key for a session route or a server-side
policy selection. The simplest way to adapt those cases is to use a
'label_prefix' instead of the 'label' attribute. Alternatively, the
'label' attribute may used by appending '" -> "' (note the whitespace).


Transition to new framework API
===============================

Since we fundamentally revised Genode's API in
[http://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/16.05#The_great_API_renovation - version 16.05],
we gradually adapt our existing components. Given that Genode comes with
over 300 components, this is no small feat. But with 30 percent of the
components converted, we already made substantial progress.

In some respects, the conversion is actually nearly complete. In particular,
the move away from format-string-based text output to our new type-safe output
facility has been applied to almost all components now. The former 'PDBG'
macro that is quite useful for temporary debug messages has been replaced with
a new version that must be manually included via the _base/debug.h_ header
file. Like the regular log functions, the new PDBG facility uses the type-safe
text-output facility.


Minor API adjustments
---------------------

While applying Genode's new API, we refined the API in the following respects:

We added a dedicated 'String' constructor overload to better accommodate
string literals. This overload covers the common case for initializing a
string from a literal without employing the 'Output' mechanism. This way, such
strings can by constructed without calling virtual functions, which in turn
makes the 'String' usable during the self-relocation phase of the dynamic
linker.

Up till now, several Genode components still rely on the use of 'snprintf'
whenever strings must be assembled out of smaller pieces. As we like to shun
format strings from Genode altogether, we needed an alternative mechanism.
Since we introduced the new type-safe text-output facilities in Genode 16.05,
there is an obvious solution: Let the 'String' constructor accept an arbitrary
list of arguments, which are turned into their respective textual
representation and appear concatenated in the resulting string. Consequently,
strings can be assembled with the same flexibility as log output. For the
construction of 'String' objects from character buffers of a known size, the
'Cstring' utility can be used, which takes a 'char const *' and an optional
length as arguments.

Several low-level types received support for the new output facilities, e.g.,
'Xml_node' or the network-related headers in _os/net/_.

In anticipation of the forthcoming package-management infrastructure, we try
to unify Genode's executable binaries across kernels and architectures
wherever reasonable. Of course, the latter is not possible with respect to the
used instructions. But unifying symbol information is deemed worthwhile. For
this reason, we changed the 'Genode::size_t' type to be always defined as an
'unsigned' 'long'. This is in contrast to GCC's built-in '__SIZE_TYPE__',
which is defined as 'unsigned int' on 32-bit architectures but 'unsigned long'
on 64-bit architectures.


OS-level infrastructure and device drivers
##########################################

New timeout-handing API
=======================

The new timeout API offers tools for easily multiplexing a single time
source among different timeouts. In general, the time source can be
implemented individually but we expect that the most prominent use case will
be the multiplexing of timer sessions. Thus, the timeout library also provides
a convenience tool for this use case. A library-usage example can be found
under _os/src/test/timeout_. If you're interested in implementing
your own time source, you can find an example at _os/include/os/timer.h_ .


Support for smart cards
=======================

We ported the [http://pcsclite.alioth.debian.org/pcsclite.html - PC/SC Lite]
library to Genode, which provides a commonly used API for communicating with
smart cards. It supports USB smart card readers, using the
[http://pcsclite.alioth.debian.org/ccid.html - CCID] library as driver.
The CCID driver itself requires [http://libusb.info - libusb] to access the
USB device.

Vanilla PC/SC Lite is structured as a client-server architecture, consisting
of the 'pcscd' daemon, which runs on a privileged user account and manages all
card reader devices, and one or more non-privileged client applications, which
communicate with pcscd to access the card readers. On Genode, pcscd's role as
privileged device manager is not really needed, since the devices can also be
managed using Genode's configuration mechanisms. For this reason, we merged
the part of pcscd which implements the API with the pcsc-lite client library.

In the current state, a Genode application using PC/SC Lite can access a single
card reader device, which is selected using its USB product ID and vendor ID in
the application's configuration and in the policy of the USB driver.

More configuration details can be found in the README files of the PC/SC Lite,
CCID, and libusb libraries in the libports repository and in the accompanying
_smartcard.run_ script.


Libraries and applications
##########################

Time-based password generation
==============================

A time-based one-time password authentication client that adheres to the
Google Authenticator standard has been introduced into the
[https://github.com/genodelabs/genode-world - world repository].

Single use, time-based passwords are commonly used as an additional
authentication step for web-based services. In this scheme, a user generates
and presents a six digit passcode to a service generated using a shared secret
and a timestamp. This short passcode length makes manual entry convenient so
that the shared secret may be stored on a separate device than the service
client, such as a smartphone, layering the security properties of both
devices.

The 'gtotp' VFS plugin provides these passcodes by embedding the generator as
a special file in the file-system layer of a component. This approach provides
readily available passcodes for programmatic and manual use without enlarging
the code base to encompass a GUI, command-line, or networked interface.

At the time of this release, the common use case is to manually retrieve codes
for clients running in VirtualBox by reading special files with an isolated
instance of the Noux runtime. Storing the shared secret on the same device
contradicts the recommendations of the standard but the trade-off is that the
software stack required to host the shared secret is significantly smaller
than that found on a mobile device.


Random number generator testing
===============================

No random number generator can be proved to be good, but empirical statistical
tests can prove that some are bad. A port of the TestU01 RNG test suite is
provided in the world repository. The TestU01 batteries give independent
assurance of the fitness of Genode's CPU jitter based RNG and are available
for testing future physical and non-phyical RNGs.


VirtualBox on top on the NOVA hypervisor
########################################

Both VirtualBox-based virtual machine monitors on Genode got updated to the
latest revision as provided by Oracle, namely 4.3.40 and 5.1.10 - mainly to
stay close to the upstream versions.


Platforms
#########

Unified handling of boot modules
================================

Until now, the way of passing boot modules from the boot procedure to the core
component, which core provides as ROM modules, varied from platform to
platform. Either we used a multiboot-compliant bootloader that accepts
multiple modules, or the platform provided some specific way of linking binary
modules together with the kernel, e.g., the Elfweaver tool of OKL4.
By unifying the boot-module handover, we further reduce platform specific core
code. Thereby, maintenance costs are decreased, and code analysis becomes
easier. With this new solution, when issuing to build the core component:

! make core

within the build system, only a core library gets built. Not until all
binaries needed by a run-script are available, a final image is linked
together using the core library and all additional binaries. The core
component now can access its ROM modules directly via addresses contained in
its binary. As a side effect of this change, there is no core binary in the
'bin' or 'core' directory of the corresponding build directory available
anymore. Instead, you will find the core binary with no ROM modules, but
including debug information under 'var/run/*.core' within your build
directory. The concrete name depends on the name of the run-script.

The new approach is used on all platforms except Linux where the ROM modules
still need to be accessed via the file-system.


NOVA hypervisor
===============

We extended the kernel to support the asynchronous delegation of kernel
resources. Up to now, resources could only be delegated during RPC or during
the initial protection-domain construction. With this extension, the
construction and setup of new protection domains, threads, and especially
virtual CPUs for the VirtualBox VMM became more straightforward and several
quirks inside the 'core' component could be dropped. The added kernel syscall
expects the NOVA-kernel capabilities of the source and target protection
domains, which effectively renders the operation solely available to 'core' -
as only holder of the NOVA protection domain capabilities.

Additionally, we changed the CPU ID enumeration in Genode/NOVA to a
predictable order. The lower CPU IDs used via the Genode 'Cpu_session'
interface now correspond to the first hyper-thread of all physical CPU cores.
For example, on a quad-core machine with hyper-threading enabled Genode's CPU
IDs 0-3 refer to the first hyper-threads of all physical cores and IDs 4-7 to
the second hyper-threads.