genode/doc/release_notes-14-02.txt

              ===============================================
              Release notes for the Genode OS Framework 14.02
              ===============================================

                               Genode Labs



During the release cycle of version 14.02, our development has been focused on
storage and virtualization. It goes without saying that proper support for
block-device access and file systems is fundamental for the use of
Genode as general-purpose OS. Virtualization is relevant as well because
it bridges the gap between the functionality we need and the features
natively available on Genode today.

Our work on the storage topic involved changes of the block-driver APIs to an
asynchronous mode of operation, overhauling most of the existing block-level
components, as well as the creation of new block services, most importantly a
block cache. At file-system level, we continued our line of work on FUSE-based
file systems, adding support for NTFS-3g. A new highlight, however, is a new
file-system service that makes the file systems of the NetBSD kernel available
to Genode. This is made possible by using rump kernels as described in Section
[NetBSD file systems using rump kernels].

Virtualization on Genode has a long history, starting with the original
support of OKLinux on the OKL4 kernel (OKLinux is no longer supported), over
the support of L4Linux on top of the Fiasco.OC kernel, to the support of the
Vancouver VMM on top of NOVA. However, whereas each of those variants has
different technical merits, all of them were developed in the context of
university research projects and were never exposed to real-world scenarios.
We were longing for a solution that meets the general expectations from a
virtualization product, namely the support for a wide range of guest OSes,
guest-host integration features, ease of use, and an active development.
VirtualBox is one of the most popular commodity virtualization products as of
today. With the current release, we are happy to announce the availability of
VirtualBox on top of Genode/NOVA. Section
[VirtualBox on top of the NOVA microhypervisor] gives insights into the
background of this development, the technical challenges we had to overcome,
and the current state of the implementation.

In addition to addressing storage and virtualization, the current release
comes with a new pseudo file system called trace_fs that allows the
interactive use of Genode's tracing facilities via Unix commands,
a profound unification of the various graphics back ends used throughout
the framework, a new facility for propagating status reports, and
improvements of the Noux runtime for executing Unix software on Genode.


VirtualBox on top of the NOVA microhypervisor
#############################################

Virtualization is an important topic for Genode for two distinct reasons.
It is repeatedly requested by users of the framework who consider
Genode as a microkernel-based hosting platform for virtual machines,
and it provides a smooth migration path from using Linux-based systems
towards using Genode as day-to-day OS.

Why do people consider Genode as a hosting platform for virtual machines
if there is an abundance of mature virtualization solutions on the market?
What all existing popular solutions have in common is the staggering complexity
of their respective trusted-computing base (TCB). The user of a virtual
machine on a commodity hosting platform has to trust millions of lines of
code. For example, with Xen, the TCB comprises the hypervisor and the Linux
system running as DOM0. For security-sensitive application areas, it is
almost painful to trust such a complex foundation. In contrast, the TCB of a
hosting platform based on Genode/NOVA is two orders of magnitude less complex.
Lowering the complexity reduces the likelihood for vulnerabilities and thereby
mitigates the attack surface of the system. It also enables the assessment of
security properties by thorough evaluation or even formal verification. In the
light of the large-scale privacy issues of today, the desire for systems that
are resilient against malware and zero-day exploits has never been higher.
Microkernel-based operating systems promise a solution. Virtualization enables
compatibility to existing software. Combining both seems natural. This is what
Genode/NOVA stands for.

From the perspective of us Genode developers who are in the process of
migrating from Linux-based OSes to Genode as day-to-day OS, we consider
virtualization as a stop-gap solution for all those applications that
do not exist natively on Genode, yet. Virtualization makes our transition
an evolutionary process.

Until now, NOVA was typically accompanied with a co-developed virtual machine
monitor called Seoul (formerly called Vancouver), which is executed as a
regular user-level process on top of NOVA. In contrast to conventional wisdom
about the performance of microkernel-based systems, the Seoul VMM on top of
NOVA is extremely fast, actually faster then most (if not all) commonly used
virtualization solutions. However, originating from a research project, Seoul
is quite challenging to use and not as mature as commodity VMMs that were
developed as real-world products. For example, there is a good chance that an
attempt to boot an arbitrary version of a modern Linux distribution might just
fail. In our experience, it takes a few days to investigate the issues, modify
the guest OS configuration, and tweak the VMM here and there, to run the OS
inside the Seoul VMM. That is certainly not a show stopper in appliance-like
scenarios, but it rules out Seoul as a general solution. Running Windows
OS as guest is not supported at all, which further reduces the application
areas of Seoul. With this in mind, it is unrealistic to propose the use
of Genode/NOVA as an alternative for popular VM hosting solutions.

Out of this realization, the idea was born to combine NOVA's virtualization
interface with a time-tested and fully-featured commodity VMM. Out of the
available Open-Source virtualization solutions, we decided to take a closer
look at VirtualBox, which attracted us for several reasons: First, it is
portable, supporting various host OSes such as Solaris, Windows OS, Linux,
and Mac OS X. Second, it has all the guest-integration features we could
wish for. There are extensive so-called guest additions for popular guest
OSes that vastly improve the guest-OS performance and allow a tight
integration with the host OS using shared folders or a shared clipboard.
Third, it comes with sophisticated device models that support all
important popular guest OSes. And finally, it is actively developed and
commercially supported.

However, moving VirtualBox over to NOVA presented us with a number of
problems. As a precondition, we needed to gain a profound understanding
of the VirtualBox architecture and the code base. To illustrate the challenge,
the source-code distribution of VirtualBox comprises 2.8 million lines of
code. This code contains build tools, the VMM, management tools, several
3rd-party libraries, middleware, the guest additions, and tests. The pieces
that are relevant for the actual VMM amount to 700 thousand lines. By
reviewing the architecture, we found that the part of VirtualBox that
implements the hypervisor functionality (the world switch) runs in the
kernel of the host OS (it is loaded on demand by the user-level VM process
through the _/dev/vboxdrv_ interface into the host OS kernel). It is
appropriately named VMMR0. Once installed into the host OS kernel, it
takes over the control over the machine. To put it blatantly simple, it runs
"underneath" the host OS. The VMMR0 code is kernel agnostic, which explains
the good portability of VirtualBox across various host OSes. Porting
VirtualBox to a new host OS comes down to finding a hook for installing the
VMMR0 code into the host OS kernel and adapting the VirtualBox runtime API
to the new host OS.

In the context of microkernel-based systems, however, it becomes clear that
this classical approach of porting VirtualBox would subvert the microkernel
architecture. Not only would we need to punch a hole into NOVA for loading
additional kernel code, but also the VMMR0 code would inflate the amount of
code executed in privileged mode by more than factor 20. Both implications
are gross violations of the microkernel principle. Consequently, we needed to
find a different way to marry NOVA with VirtualBox.

Our solution was the creation of a drop-in replacement of the VMMR0 code that
runs solely at user level and interacts with NOVA's virtualization
interface. Our VMMR0 emulation code is co-located with the VirtualBox
VM process. Architecturally, the resulting solution is identical to the
use of Seoul on top of NOVA. There is one VM process per virtual machine,
and each VM process is isolated from others by the NOVA kernel. In
addition to creating the VMMR0 emulation code, we needed to replace some parts
of the VirtualBox VMMR3 code with custom implementations because they
overlapped with functionality provided by NOVA's virtualization interface,
in particular the provisioning of guest-physical memory. Finally, we needed
to interface the VM process with Genode's API to let the VM process
interact with Genode's input, file-system, and framebuffer services.

The result of this undertaking is available at the _ports_ repository.
VirtualBox can be downloaded and integrated with Genode via the following
command issued from within the repository:
! make prepare PKG=virtualbox

To illustrate the integration of VirtualBox into a Genode system, there
is run script located at _ports/run/virtualbox.run_. It expects a
bootable ISO image containing a guest OS at _<build-dir>/bin/test.iso_.
The configuration of the VirtualBox process is as simple as
! <config>
!   <image type="iso" file="/iso/test.iso" />
! </config>

VirtualBox will try to obtain the specified ISO file via a file-system
session. Furthermore, it will open a framebuffer session and an input session.
The memory assigned to the guest OS depends on the RAM quota assigned to the
VirtualBox process. Booting a guest OS stored in a VDI file is supported. The
image type must be changed to "vdi" accordingly.

Please note that this first version of VirtualBox is far from being complete
as it lacks many features (SMP, guest-addition support, networking), is not
optimized, and must be considered as experimental. However, we could
successfully run GNU/Linux, Android, Windows XP, Windows 7, HelenOS, Minix-3,
GNU Hurd, and of course Genode inside VirtualBox.

One point we are pretty excited about is that the porting effort to
Genode/NOVA did not require any change of Genode. From Genode's point of
view, VirtualBox is just an ordinary leaf node of the process tree, which
can happily co-exist with other processes - even if it is the Seoul VMM.

[image seoul-vbox-win7-tinycore]

In the screenshot above, VirtualBox is running besides the Seoul VMM on top of
Genode/NOVA. Seoul executes Tinycore Linux as guest OS. VirtualBox executes MS
Windows 7. Both VMMs are using hardware virtualization (VT-x) but are plain
user-level programs with no special privileges.


NetBSD file systems using rump kernels
######################################

In the previous release, we made FUSE-based file systems available to Genode
via a custom implementation of the FUSE API. Even though this step made
several popular file systems available, we found that the file systems most
important to us (such as ext) are actually not well supported by FUSE. For
example, write support on ext2 is declared as an experimental feature. In
hindsight it is clear why: FUSE is primarily being used for accessing file
systems not found in the Linux kernel. So it shines with supporting NTFS
but less so with file systems that are well supported by the Linux kernel.
Coincidentally, when we came to this realization, we stumbled upon the
wonderful work of Antti Kantee on so-called rump kernels:

:[https://wiki.netbsd.org/rumpkernel/]:
  Rump kernel Wiki

The motivation behind the rump kernels was the development of
NetBSD kernel subsystems (referred to as "drivers") in the NetBSD user land.
Such subsystems like file systems, device drivers, or the TCP/IP stack are
linked against a stripped-down version of the NetBSD kernel that can be
executed in user mode and uses a fairly small "hypercall" interface to
interact with the outside world. A rump kernel contains everything needed to
execute NetBSD kernel subsystems but hardly anything else. In particular, it
does not support the execution of programs on top. From our perspective,
having crafted device-driver environments (DDEs) for Linux, iPXE, and OSS over
the years, a rump kernel sounded pretty much like a DDE for NetBSD. So we
started exploring rump kernels with the immediate goal of making time-tested
NetBSD file systems available to Genode.

To our delight, the integration of rump kernels into the Genode system went
fairly smooth. The most difficult part was the integration of the NetBSD build
infrastructure with Genode's build system. The glue between rump kernels and
Genode is less than 3,000 lines of code. This code enables us to reuse all
NetBSD file systems on Genode. A rump kernel instance that contains several
file systems such as ext2, iso9660, msdos, and ffs takes about 8 MiB of memory
when executed on Genode.

The support for rump kernels comes in the form of the dedicated _dde_rump_
repository. For downloading and integrating the required NetBSD source code,
the repository contains a Makefile providing the usual 'make prepare'
mechanism. To build the file-system server, make sure to add the _dde_rump_
repository to the 'REPOSITORIES' declaration of your _etc/build.conf_ file
within your build directory. The server then can be built via
! make server/rump_fs

There is a run script located at _dde_rump/run/rump_ext2.run_ to execute
a simple test scenario:
! make run/rump_ext2

The server can be configured as follows:
!<start name="rump_fs">
!  <resource name="RAM" quantum="8M" />
!  <provides><service name="File_system"/></provides>
!  <config fs="ext2fs"><policy label="" root="/" writeable="yes"/></config>
!</start>

On startup, it requests a service that provides a block session. If
there is more than one block session in the system, the block session must be
routed to the right block-session server. The value of the _fs_ attribute of
the '<config>' node can be one of the following: _ext2fs_ for EXT2, _cd9660_ for
ISO-9660, or _msdos_ for FAT file-system support. _root_ defines the directory
of the file system as seen as root directory by the client. The server hands
most of its RAM quota to the rump kernel. This means the larger the quota is,
the larger the internal block caches of the rump kernel will be.


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

The base API has not underwent major changes apart from the addition of
a few new utilities and minor refinements. Under the hood, however, the inner
workings of the framework received much attention, including an extensive
unification of the startup code and stack management.


New 'construct_at' utility
==========================

A new utility located at 'base/include/util/construct_at.h' allows for the
manual placement of objects without the need to have a global placement new
operation nor the need for type-specific new operators.


New utility for managing volatile objects
=========================================

Throughout Genode, we maintain a programming style that largely avoids dynamic
memory allocations. For the most part, higher-level objects aggregate
lower-level objects as class members. For example, the nitpicker GUI server
is actually a compound of such aggregations (see
[https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/blob/master/os/src/server/nitpicker/main.cc#L803 - Nitpicker::Main]).
This functional programming style leads to robust programs but it poses a
problem for programs that are expected to adopt their behaviour at runtime.
For the example of nitpicker, the graphics back end of the GUI server takes
the size of the screen as constructor argument. If the screen size changes,
the once constructed graphics back end becomes inconsistent with the new
screen size. We desire a way to selectively replace an aggregated object by a
new version with updated constructor arguments. The new utilities found in
'os/include/util/volatile_object.h' solve this problem. A so-called
'Volatile_object' wraps an object of the type specified as template argument.
In contrast of a regular object, a 'Volatile_object' can be re-constructed any
number of times by calling 'construct' with the constructor arguments. It is
accompanied with a so-called 'Lazy_volatile_object', which remains
unconstructed until 'construct' is called the first time.


Changed interface of 'Signal_rpc_member'
========================================

We unified the 'Signal_rpc_member' interface to be more consistent with the
'Signal_rpc_dispatcher'. The new version takes an entrypoint as argument and
cares for dissolving itself from the entrypoint when destructed.


Filename as default label for ROM connections
=============================================

Since the first version of Genode, ROM services used to rely on a "filename"
provided as session argument. In the meanwhile, we established the use of the
session label to select routing policies as well as server-side policies.
Strictly speaking, the name of a ROM module is used as a key to a server-side
policy of ROM services. So why not to use the session label to express the
key as we do with other services? By assigning the file name as label for ROM
sessions, we may become able to remove the filename argument in the future by
just interpreting the last part of the label as filename. By keeping only the
label, we won't need to consider conditional routing (via '<if-arg>') based on
session arguments other than the label anymore, which would simplify Genode
configurations in the long run. This change is transparent at API level but
may be taken into consideration when configuring Genode systems.


New 'Genode::Deallocator' interface
===================================

By splitting the new 'Genode::Deallocator' interface from the former
'Genode::Allocator' interface, we become able to restrict the accessible
operations for code that is only supposed to release memory, but not
perform any allocations.

Closely related to the allocator interface, we introduced variants of the
'new' operator that take a reference (as opposed to a pointer) to a
'Genode::Allocator' as argument.


Unified main-stack management and startup code among all platforms
==================================================================

In contrast to the stacks of regular threads, which are located within a
dedicated virtual-address region called thread-context area, the stack of
the main thread of a Genode program used to be located within the BSS
segment. If the stack of a normal thread overflows, the program produces
an unresolvable page fault, which can be easily debugged. However,
an overflowing main stack would silently corrupt the BSS segment. With
the current release, we finally resolved this long-standing problem by
moving the main stack to the context area, too. The tricky part was that
the context area is created by the main thread. So we hit a hen-and-egg
problem. We overcame this problem by splitting the process startup
into two stages, both called from the crt0 assembly code. The first
stage runs on a small stack within the BSS and has the sole purpose
of creating the context area and a thread object for the main thread.
This code path (and thereby the stack usage) is the same for all programs.
So we can safely dimension the stage-1 stack. Once the first stage
returns to the crt0 assembly code, the stack pointer is loaded with the
stack that is now located within the context area. Equipped with the
new stack, the actual startup code ('_main') including the global
constructors of the program is executed.

This change paved the ground for several further code unifications and
simplifications, in particular related to the dynamic linker.


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

Revised block-driver framework
==============================

Whereas Genode's block-session interface was designed to work asynchronously
and supports the out-of-order processing of requests, those capabilities
remained unused by the existing block services as those services used to
operate synchronously to keep their implementation simple. However, this
simplicity came at the prize of two disadvantages: First, it prevented us
to fully utilize native command queuing of modern disk controllers. Second,
when chaining components such as a block driver, the part_blk server, and
a file system, latencies accumulated along the chain of services. This
hurts the performance of random access patterns.

To overcome this limitation, we changed the block-component framework to work
asynchronously and to facilitate the recently introduced server API.
Consequently, all users of the API underwent an update. The affected
components are rom_loopdev, atapi_drv, fb_block_adapter, http_block, usb_drv,
and part_blk. For some components, in particular part_blk, this step led to a
complete redesign.

Besides the change of the block-component framework, the block-session
interface got extended to support logical block addresses greater than
32bit (LBA48). Thereby, the block component framework can now support
devices that exceed 2 TiB in size.


Block cache
===========

The provisioning of a block cache was one of the primary motivations behind the
[https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/13.11#Dynamic_resource_balancing - dynamic resource balancing]
concept that was introduced in Genode 13.11. We are now introducing the first
version of such a cache.

The new block cache component located at _os/src/server/blk_cache/_ is both
a block-session client as well as a block-session server serving a single
client. It is meant to sit between a block-device driver and a file-system
server. When accessing the block device, it issues requests at a granularity
of 4K and thereby implicitly reads ahead whenever a client requests a smaller
amount of blocks. Blocks obtained from the device or written by the client
are kept in memory. If memory becomes scarce, the block cache first tries
to request further memory resources from its parent. If the request
gets denied, the cache evicts blocks from memory to the block device following
a least-recently-used replacement strategy. As of now, the block cache supports
dynamic resource requests to grow on demand but support for handling yield
requests is not yet implemented. So memory once handed out to the block cache
cannot be regained. Adding support for yielding memory on demand will be
complemented in the next version.

To see how to integrate the block cache in a Genode scenario, there is a
ready-to-use run script available at _os/run/blk_cache.run_.



File-system infrastructure
==========================

In addition to the integration of NetBSD's file systems, there are
file-system-related improvements all over the place.

First, the 'File_system::Session' interface has been extended with a 'sync'
RPC function. This function allows the client of a file system to force
the file system to write back its internal caches.

Second, we extended the FUSE implementation introduced with the previous
release.
Since file systems tend to have a built-in caching mechanism, we need to
sync these caches at the end of a session when using the fuse_fs server.
Therefore, each FUSE file system port has to implement a 'Fuse::sync_fs()'
function that executes the necessary actions if requested. Further
improvements are related to the handling of symbolic links and error
handling. Finally, we added a libc plugin for accessing NTFS file systems
via the ntfs-3g library.

Third, we complemented the family of FUSE-based libc plugins with a family of
FUSE-based file-system servers. To utilize a FUSE file system, there is a
dedicated binary (e.g., _os/src/server/fuse_fs/ext2_) for each FUSE
file-system server.
Note that write support is possible but considered to be experimental at this
point. For now, using it is not recommended.
To use the ext2_fuse_fs server in Noux, the following configuration snippet
may be used:

! <start name="ext2_fuse_fs">
!   <resource name="RAM" quantum="8M"/>
!   <provides> <service name="File_system"/> </provides>
!   <config>
!     <policy label="noux -> fuse" root="/" writeable="no" />
!   </config>
! </start>

Finally, the libc file-system plugin has been extended to support 'unlink'.


Trace file system
=================

The new _trace_fs_ server provides access to a trace session by providing a
file-system session as front end. Combined with Noux, it allows for the
interactive exploration and tracing of Genode's process tree using
traditional Unix tools.

Each trace subject is represented by a directory ('thread_name.subject') that
contains specific files, which are used to control the tracing process of the
thread as well as storing the content of its trace buffer:

:'enable': The tracing of a thread is activated if there is a valid policy
  installed and the intend to trace the subject was made clear by writing '1'
  to the 'enable' file. The tracing of a thread may be deactivated by writing a
  '0' to this file.

:'policy': A policy may be changed by overwriting the currently used one in the
  'policy' file. In this case, the old policy is replaced by the new one and
  automatically used by the framework.

:'buffer_size': Writing a value to the 'buffer_size' file changes the size of
  the trace buffer. This value is evaluated only when reactivating the tracing
  of the thread.

:'events': The trace-buffer contents may be accessed by reading from the
  'events' file. New trace events are appended to this file.

:'active': Reading the file will return whether the tracing is active (1) or
  not (0).

:'cleanup': Nodes of untraced subjects are kept as long as they do not change
  their tracing state to dead. Dead untraced nodes are automatically removed
  from the file system. Subjects that were traced before and are now untraced
  can be removed by writing '1' to the 'cleanup' file.

To use the trace_fs, a configuration similar to the following may be used:

! <start name="trace_fs">
!   <resource name="RAM" quantum="128M"/>
!   <provides><service name="File_system"/></provides>
!   <config>
!           <policy label="noux -> trace"
!                   interval="1000"
!                   subject_limit="512"
!                   trace_quota="64M" />
!   </config>
! </start>

:'interval': sets the period the Trace_session is polled. The
  time is given in milliseconds.

:'subject_limit': specifies how many trace subjects should by acquired at
  max when the Trace_session is polled.

:'trace_quota': is the amount of quota the trace_fs should use for the
  Trace_session connection. The remaining amount of RAM quota will be used
  for the actual nodes of the file system and the 'policy' as well as the
  'events' files.

In addition, there are 'buffer_size' and 'buffer_size_limit' that define
the initial and the upper limit of the size of a trace buffer.

A ready-to-use run script can by found in 'ports/run/noux_trace_fs.run'.


Unified interfaces for graphics
===============================

Genode comes with several programs that perform software-based graphics
operations. A few noteworthy examples are the nitpicker GUI server,
the launchpad, the scout tutorial browser, or the terminal. Most of those
programs were equipped with their custom graphics back end. In some
cases such as the terminal, nitpicker's graphics back end was re-used.
But this back end is severely limited because its sole purpose is the
accommodation of the minimalistic (almost invisible) nitpicker GUI server.

The ongoing work on Genode's new user interface involves the creation of
new components that rely on a graphics back end. Instead of further
diversifying the zoo of graphics back ends, we took the intermediate step
to consolidate the existing back ends into one unified concept such that
application-specific graphics back ends can be created and extended using
modular building blocks. The new versions of nitpicker, scout, launchpad,
liquid_fb, nitlog, and terminal have been changed to use the new common
interfaces:

:os/include/util/geometry.h: Basic data structures and operations needed
  for 2D graphics.

:os/include/util/color.h: Common color representation and utilities.

:os/include/os/pixel_rgba.h: Class template for representing a pixel.

:os/include/os/pixel_rgb565.h: Template specializations for RGB565 pixels.

:os/include/os/surface.h: Target surface, onto which graphics operations
  can be applied.

:os/include/os/texture.h: Source texture for graphics operations that
  transfer 2D pixel data to a surface.

The former _os/include/nitpicker_gfx/_ directory is almost deserted. The only
remainders are functors for the few graphics operations actually required by
nitpicker. For the scout widgets, the corresponding functors have become
available at the public headers at _demo/include/scout_gfx/_.

Because the scout widget set is used by at least three programs and will
most certainly play a role in new GUI components, we undertook a major
cleanup of the parts worth reusing. The result can be found at
_demo/include/scout/_.


New session interface for status reporting
==========================================

Genode has a uniform way of how configuration information is passed from
parents to children within the process tree by the means of "config" ROM
modules. Using this mechanism, a parent is able to steer the behaviour of
its children, not just at their start time but also during runtime.
Until now, however, there was no counterpart to the config mechanism, which
would allow a child to propagate runtime information to its parent. There
are many use cases for such a mechanism. For example, a bus-controller driver
might want to propagate a list of devices attached to the bus. When a new
device gets plugged in, this list should be updated to let the parent
take the new device resource into consideration. Another use case would be the
propagation of status information such as the feature set of a plugin.
Taken to the extreme, a process might expose its entire internal state to its
parent in order to allow the parent to kill and restart the process, and
feed the saved state back to the new process instance.

To cover these use cases, we introduced the new report-session interface. When
a client opens a report session, it transfers a part of its RAM quota to the
report server. In return, the report server hands out a dataspace dimensioned
according to the donated quota. Upon reception of the dataspace, the client
can write its status reports into the dataspace and inform the server about
the update via the 'submit' function. In addition to the mere reporting of
status information, the report-session interface is designed to allow the
server to respond to reports. For example, if the report mechanism is used to
implement a desktop notification facility, the user may interactively respond
to an incoming notification. This response can be reflected to the originator
of the notification via the 'response_sigh' and 'obtain_response' functions.

The new _report_rom_ component is both a report service and a ROM service. It
reflects incoming reports as ROM modules. The ROM modules are named
after the label of the corresponding report session.

Configuration
-------------

The report-ROM server hands out ROM modules only if explicitly permitted by a
configured policy. For example:

! <config>
!   <rom>
!     <policy label="decorator -> pointer" report="nitpicker -> pointer"/>
!     <policy ...  />
!     ...
!   </rom>
! </config>

The label of an incoming ROM session is matched against the 'label' attribute
of all '<policy>' nodes. If the session label matches a policy label, the
client obtains the data from the report client with the label specified in the
'report' attribute. In the example above, the nitpicker GUI server sends
reports about the pointer position to the report-ROM service. Those reports
are handed out to a window decorator (labeled "decorator") as ROM module.


XML generator utility
=====================

With the new report-session interface in place, comes the increased
need to produce XML data. The new XML generator utility located at
_os/include/util/xml_generator.h_ makes this extremely easy, thanks to
C++11 language features. For an example application, refer to
_os/src/test/xml_generator/_ and the corresponding run script at
_os/run/xml_generator.run_.


Dynamic ROM service for automated testing
=========================================

The new _dynamic_rom_ service provides ROM modules that change during the
lifetime of a ROM session according to a timeline. The main purpose of this
service is the automated testing of programs that are able to respond to ROM
module changes, for example configuration changes.

The configuration of the dynamic ROM server contains a '<rom>' sub node per
ROM module provided by the service. Each '<rom>' node hosts a 'name' attribute
and contains a sequence of sub nodes that define the timeline of the ROM
module. The possible sub nodes are:

:'<inline>': The content of the '<inline>' node is assigned to the content
  of the ROM module.

:'<sleep>': Sleeps a number of milliseconds as specified via the 'milliseconds'
  attribute.

:'<empty>': Removes the ROM module.

At the end of the timeline, it re-starts at the beginning.


Nitpicker GUI server
====================

The nitpicker GUI server has been enhanced to support dynamic screen
resizing. This is needed to let nitpicker respond to screen-resolution
changes, or when using a nested version of nitpicker within a resizable
virtual framebuffer window.

To accommodate Genode's upcoming user-interface concept, we introduced the
notion of a parent-child relationship between nitpicker views. If an existing
view is specified as parent at construction time of a new view, the parent
view's position is taken as the origin of the child view's coordinate space.
This allows for the grouping of views, which can be atomically repositioned by
moving their common parent view. Another use case is the handling of popup
menus in Qt5, which can now be positioned relative to their corresponding
top-level window. The relative position is maintained transparently to Qt when
the top-level window gets repositioned.


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

Noux runtime for executing Unix software
========================================

Noux plays an increasingly important role for Genode as it allows the use
of the GNU software stack. Even though it already supported a variety of
packages including bash, gcc, binutils, coreutils, make, and vim, some
programs were still limited by Noux' not fully complete POSIX semantics,
in particular with regard to signal handling. For example, it was not
possible to cancel the execution of a long-running process via Control-C.

To overcome those limitations, we enhanced Noux by adding the _kill_ syscall,
reworking the _wait_ and _execve_ syscalls, as well as adding
signal-dispatching code to the Noux libc. Special attention had to be paid to
the preservation of pending signals during the process creation via _fork_ and
_execve_.

The current implementation delivers signals each time a Noux syscall
returns. Signal handlers are executed as part of the normal control flow. This
is in contrast to traditional Unix implementations, which allow the
asynchronous invocation of signal handlers out of band with the regular
program flow. The obvious downside of our solution is that a program that got
stuck in a busy loop (and thereby not issuing any system calls) won't respond
to signals. However, as we regard the Unix interface just as a runtime and not
as the glue that holds the system together, we think that this compromise is
justified to keep the implementation simple and kernel-agnostic. In the worst
case, if a Noux process gets stuck because of such a bug, we certainly can
live with the inconvenience of restarting the corresponding Noux subsystem.

To complement our current activities on the block and file-system levels,
the e2fsprogs-v1.42.9 package as been ported to Noux. To allow the
block-device utilities to operate on Genode's block sessions, we added a new
"block" file system to Noux. Such a block file system can be mounted using a
'<block>' node within the '<fstab>'. By specifying a label attribute, each
block session request can be routed to the proper block session provider:

! <fstab>
!   ...
!   <dir name="dev">
!     <block name="blkdev0" label="block_session_0" />
!   </dir>
!   ...
! </fstab>

In addition to this file system, support for the DIOCGMEDIASIZE ioctl
request was added. This request is used by FreeBSD and therefore by our
libc to query the size of the block device in bytes.


Qt5 refinements
===============

Our port of Qt5 used to rely on custom versions of synchronization
primitives such as 'QWaitCondition' and 'QMutex'. However, since most of the
usual pthread synchronization functions as relied on by Qt5's regular POSIX
back end have been added to Genode's pthread library by now, we could replace
our custom implementations by Qt5's POSIX version.


Platforms
#########

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

The development of our base-hw kernel platform during this release cycle was
primarily geared towards adding multi-processor support. However, as we
haven't exposed the code to thorough testing yet, we deferred the integration
of this feature for the current release.

We increased the number of usable ARM platforms by adding basic support for
the ODROID XU board.


NOVA microhypervisor
====================

The port of VirtualBox to Genode prompted us to improve the NOVA platform in
the following respects.

NOVA used to omit the propagation of the FPU state of the guest OS to the
virtual machine monitor (VMM) during the world switch between the guest OS and
the VMM. With the Vancouver VMM, which is traditionally used on NOVA, this
omission did not pose any problem because Vancouver would never touch the FPU
state of the guest. So the FPU context of the guest was always preserved
throughout the handling of virtualization events. However, in contrast to the
Vancouver VMM, VirtualBox relies on the propagation of the FPU state between
the guest running in VT-X non-root mode and the guest running within the
VirtualBox recompiler. Without properly propagating the FPU state between both
virtualization back ends, both the guest OS in non-root mode and VirtualBox's
recompiler would corrupt each other's FPU state. After first implementing an
interim solution in our custom version of the kernel, the missing FPU context
propagation had been implemented in the upstream version of NOVA as well.

In contrast to most kernels, NOVA did not allow a thread to yield its current
time slice to another thread. The only way to yield CPU time was to block on
a semaphore or to perform an RPC call. Unfortunately both of those instruments
require the time-receiving threads to explicitly unblock the yielding thread
(by releasing the semaphore or replying to the RPC call). However, there are
situations where the progress of a thread may depend on an external
condition or a side effect produced by another (unknown) thread. One
particular example is the spin lock used to protect (an extremely short)
critical section of Genode's lock metadata. Apparently VirtualBox presented
us with several more use cases for thread-yield semantics. Therefore, we
decided to extend NOVA's kernel interface with a new 'YIELD' opcode to the
'ec_control' system call.