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genode/doc/release_notes-18-05.txt
Norman Feske e533fe44b0 Release notes for version 18.05
2018-05-31 14:02:21 +02:00

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===============================================
Release notes for the Genode OS Framework 18.05
===============================================
Genode Labs
The driver behind the release 18.05 is the rapid evolution of the Sculpt
general-purpose OS. Following the initial version from February, which was
targeted at early adopters, the new Sculpt for The Curious (TC) introduces a
much more welcoming and empowering user experience (Section
[Sculpt for The Curious]).
It goes without saying that the interactive and dynamic nature of the Sculpt
scenario puts a lot more pressure on Genode's components compared to static
workloads. For example, Sculpt calls for the dynamic adjustment of user-level
network routing, the dynamic detection and management of partitions and file
systems, the support of USB storage devices from diverse vendors, and a way to
adapt the visual appearance to a great variety of screen resolutions. Most
improvements described below are our responses to these challenges.
That said, the release is not short of new features either. E.g., it features
the initial port of OpenJDK's HotSpot VM for executing Java programs on Genode
directly (Section [Java language support]), improves the support for the NXP
i.MX family of SoCs (Section [NXP i.MX SoC]), and enhances the VFS with new
plugins for copy-on-write and the auditing of file accesses
(Section [New VFS plugins]).
The release is complemented by the annual update of the Genode Foundations
book (PDF), which covers the fundamentals of the framework in great detail
(Section [New revision of the Genode Foundations book]).
Sculpt for The Curious
######################
With Sculpt for The Curious (TC), Genode 18.05 features the second revision of
the Sculpt general-purpose OS. Compared to the initial version for Early
Adopters (EA), it features a new interactive system-management component that
streamlines common tasks like the management of storage devices, or
configuring the network connectivity. The highlights of the new version of the
base system image are:
* Live-customization of almost all aspects of the system,
* The ability to install and run software in memory only,
* Hotplugging of USB storage devices,
* New support for NVMe storage devices in addition to SATA disks,
* Interactive network configuration including Wifi connectivity,
* Interactive management and inspection of storage devices and partitions,
* The option to host a complete and customized Sculpt installation on a
USB stick,
* Automated on-demand installation of software packages with visual feedback,
* Scalable fonts that are automatically adjusted to the screen resolution, and
* UEFI boot supported by default.
The base image is extensible by downloadable software packages that may
originate from different sources, safeguarded by cryptographic signatures.
It contains several example subsystems as a starting point:
* Basic GUI components like a window manager, a scalable backdrop, a
font server, and a simple software-rendering demo,
* A light-weight noux runtime for executing command-line-based software
such as GNU coreutils, bash, and vim.
* A package for downloading the installer and a suitable virtual-machine
configuration for Debian Linux,
* VirtualBox running Debian Linux,
* An example for running libretro-based games,
* A disposable VM that runs Firefox on TinyCore Linux, executed either in
VirtualBox or the light-weight Seoul virtual-machine monitor,
* A Qt5-based text editor.
Please refer to the updated
[https://genode.org/documentation/articles/sculpt-tc - Sculpt documentation]
to explore Sculpt TC.
The Sculpt version included with the current release requires the user to
build a boot image by hand. Following the steps described in the
documentation, this procedure takes a few minutes. We plan to provide
downloadable boot images a few weeks down the road once Sculpt TC received
intensive day-to-day testing by the early adopters. Your feedback is very
welcome!
New revision of the Genode Foundations book
###########################################
The "Genode Foundations" book received its annual revision, which reflects
the evolution of the framework over the past year. Specifically, the changes
since the last year's edition are:
: <div class="visualClear"><!-- --></div>
: <p>
: <div style="clear: both; float: left; margin-right:20px;">
: <a class="internal-link" href="https://genode.org">
: <img class="image-inline" src="http://genode.org/documentation/genode-foundations-title.png">
: </a>
: </div>
: </p>
* Changed boot-loader infrastructure on PC hardware
* Package management
* Structural changes of Genode's custom base-hw kernel
* API improvements: Unicode handling, support for XML-based data models,
timeout-handling API
: <div class="visualClear"><!-- --></div>
To examine the changes in detail, please refer to the book's
[https://github.com/nfeske/genode-manual/commits/master - revision history].
Storage infrastructure
######################
VFS library and plugin interface
================================
The VFS (Virtual-File-System) library was expanded to meet new requirements
for the Sculpt scenario. The traditional file-system medium for component
state and configuration sculpting is the *ram_fs* server, but with the
limitation that files stored in the server are ephemeral. Any changes to
the initial state are lost when a system is shut down or the *ram_fs* server
is restarted. Now that persistent storage is usually served by a VFS plugin
hosted by the VFS server, it was a natural progression to introduce a means
for indicating VFS changes with 'File_system' session notifications. To this
end the VFS server was amended to send session notifications, and notification
support was added to the Rump and FatFs VFS plugins, allowing Ext2 and FAT
file-systems to host dynamic component state and configuration information.
Using the VFS for serving font data produced from files stored in the VFS made
it practical to allow VFS plugins to introspect the file system. Plugins now
have the means to access arbitrary paths from the file-system root or they may
host and expose their own internal file systems.
While the core of the VFS library is small compared to contemporaries in other
operating systems, the moment came to promote the VFS from a static to a
shared library. Components that use the C runtime have always loaded the VFS
dynamically as a subsystem of _libc.lib.so_, but native components carried the
bulk of its implementation. The VFS library is now provided as a shared
library and is included with the front-end server in the _src/vfs_ depot
archive. This change affects components that have been rebuilt against the
shared library but do not have their ROM policies updated to allow access to
the _vfs.lib.so_ ROM.
New VFS plugins
===============
File-system introspection has made two additional plugins possible, the *audit*
and *cow* plugins.
The *audit* plugin logs VFS paths as they are accessed to a dedicated LOG
session. This is useful for finding the files required by third-party
components without relying on documentation or auditing source code.
The *cow* plugin emulates copy-on-write behavior by copying the contents of
files lying in a read-only path to a read-write path as they are opened. This
plugin is considered a proof-of-concept and under-performing, but opens a way
of experimenting with seeding user-managed file-systems from immutable
file-system archives.
Plugins of this kind are most appropriately instantiated in the VFS server
with policies to restrict the intended components into paths provided by the
plugins. This prevents a component from escaping the effect of the plugin. An
example of "auditing" a libc component follows:
! <start name="audit_fs">
! <binary name="vfs"/>
! <config>
! <vfs>
! <dir name="data"> <!-- source files -->
! <tar "data.tar"/>
! <ram/>
! </dir>
! <dir name="audit"> <!-- virtual path that captures /data -->
! <audit path="/data"/>
! </dir>
! </vfs>
! <!-- route into virtual audit path -->
! <policy label_suffix="audit" root="/audit" writeable="yes"/>
! </config>
! </start>
!
! <start name="app">
! <config>
! <libc stdout="/log" stderr="/log"/>
! <vfs>
! <log/>
! <fs label="audit"/>
! </vfs>
! </config>
! </start>
Improved disk-partition discovery and access
============================================
The 'part_blk' component, which parses the partition table on a block device
and provides access to each partition through a block session, was extended to
make it easier to implement a management component on top of it. It now
features additional attributes in its report. For one the block size of each
partition as well as the type of the file system on the partition are
reported. The file system probing implementation is minimal and only contains
file systems that are commonly used on Genode systems, i.e., FAT32 and Ext2.
Furthermore, on GPT formatted disks, each partition has an 'expandable'
attribute that contains the number of blocks by which the partition can be
grown. The following exemplary report illustrates the adjustments:
!<partitions type="gpt" total_blocks="500118192" gpt_total="500118125" gpt_used="302254080">
! <partition number="1" name="BIOS boot partition"
! type="21686148-6449-6e6f-744e-656564454649" guid="db0701aa-02ae-474d-92d0-82738bfce5d2"
! start="2048" length="2048" block_size="512"/>
! <partition number="2" name="EFI System"
! type="c12a7328-f81f-11d2-ba4b-00a0c93ec93b" guid="74e43226-2afb-4575-bdda-83bf72f5a6e7"
! start="4096" length="262144" block_size="512" file_system="FAT32"/>
! <partition number="3" name="GENODE"
! type="0fc63daf-8483-4772-8e79-3d69d8477de4" guid="a950091d-87ba-4800-85bf-7b6a58abe6d5"
! start="235147264" length="67108864" block_size="512" file_system="Ext2"
! expandable="197862064"/>
!</partitions>
The heuristics of how the component probes the partition table were also
loosened. Instead of explicitly enabling support for GPT, the component will
now always try to parse the MBR as well as the GPT. It will bail out if both
are considered valid since using GPT/MBR hybrid tables is not supported and it
should be up to the user to make an educated decision. In cases where there is
no partition table, a 'partitions' report of 'type="disk"' will be generated
in which the complete disk is presented as partition number '0'. This is
needed as compatibility fallback for Sculpt EA installations.
Creating and modifying GUID partition tables
============================================
Part of the enhancements of Sculpt TC is the ability to manipulate the block
device used by Sculpt. We implemented a component called 'gpt_write', which
can create and modify a GPT and its entries. It considers alignment
constraints to make better use of 512e devices. It will, however, not perform
any boundary checking. It does not handle overlapping partitions and only when
applying a partition, it makes sure that the partition will fit. The following
configuration illustrates its operation:
!<start name="gpt_write">
! <resource name="RAM" quantum="2M"/>
! <config verbose="yes" initialize="yes" align="4K">
! <actions>
! <add entry="1" type="BIOS" label="GRUB BIOS" start="2048" size="1M"/>
! <add entry="2" type="EFI" label="EFI System" start="4096" size="16M"/>
! <add entry="3" type="Linux" label="GENODE" start="36864" size="128M"/>
! <add type="BDP" label="FAT32 Data" size="max"/>
! <delete entry="1"/>
! <delete label="FAT32 Data"/>
! <modify label="GENODE" new_label="GENODE*" new_size="max"/>
! </actions>
! </config>
!</start>
Please read _repos/gems/src/app/gpt_write/README_ for more detailed information
on how to use the component and feel free to check out the run script
_repos/gems/run/gpt_write.run_.
User-level networking
#####################
NIC router
==========
The NIC router has received major improvements that were mainly motivated by
our daily experience with the Sculpt scenario where the router serves as NAPT
component in front of the virtual machines that host our work OS's. In this
role, it is subject to a permanent load driven by real-world tasks.
Furthermore, it has to have a user interface that makes it a pleasant
experience to deploy in a dynamic environment. This led to our primary goal:
We had to overcome the need to restart the NIC router, and thereby all
components that depend on it, whenever its configuration changes and while
doing so, not to interrupt the communication of its client unnecessarily.
We managed to make the NIC router fully re-configurable at runtime in a way
that it always tries to keep as much state information as possible throughout
the process. This means that network communication going through the NIC
router is not affected by a configuration update unless the configuration
change affects parts that were involved in an existing communication channel.
One prerequisite for this feature was that NIC session clients can connect at
any time to the NIC router regardless of whether there is a matching domain
for the session or not. As long as a session has no domain, the NIC router
does not send any packet to it and drops all packets coming from it. But, at
least, the session and the corresponding client component stay alive, even if
their already assigned domain disappears with a new configuration.
At the uplink, in contrast, the lifetime of the session remains bound to the
lifetime of the domain. The uplink domain-tag received a new attribute
named 'label' (only considered at the domain-tag of the uplink). It denotes
the label of the uplink session. With these two particularities of the uplink
domain, one can now easily switch between different NIC session servers. The
NIC router will close and request the corresponding NIC session with the
current 'label' value if the 'domain' node is removed/added or the label
changes. Thereby, the NIC router can now be used to dynamically switch between
network interfaces like wireless and wired adapters.
Furthermore, we improved the NIC router's ability to handle DNS server
information. Domains can wait for the DNS server info of the DHCP client of
another domain. This is done with the new attribute 'dns_server_from' in the
'<dhcp_server>' tag. Each time the DNS server info of the remote domain
changes, the DHCP server with the 'dns_server_from' attribute will toggle the
link state of each session at its domain. This can be used by clients as a
hint to request their DHCP info anew from the NIC router and thereby receive
the updated DNS server information.
When it comes to protocols, the most notable change is that the NIC router now
also supports routing and NAPT for ICMP. With the new '<icmp>' sub node of the
'<domain>' tag, ICMP routes to other domains can be created. Instead of ports,
the ICMP IDs are used for NAPT. Similar to the 'udp-ports' and 'tcp-ports'
attributes, the size of the ID space for each NAPT client is configured via
the new 'icmp-ids' attribute in the '<nat>' tag.
Last but not least, the following small features were also added to the NIC
router:
:Attribute 'verbose_packets' for the '<config>' and the '<domain>' node:
Toggles the logging of most important protocol header fields globally or
domain-locally. The 'verbose' attribute does not affect this kind of debug
output anymore.
:Report DNS server info:
If the 'config' attribute in the '<report>' node is enabled, the NIC router
will now also report the DNS server info for each domain.
:Attribute 'config_triggers' in the '<report>' node:
Toggles whether the NIC router immediately sends a report whenever the IPv4
configuration of a domain changes, regardless of any timeouts.
:IPv4 point-to-point support:
If a domain receives an IP configuration with a subnet mask of
255.255.255.255 it will switch to point-to-point IPv4 (requires a valid
gateway address at the domain).
:ICMP destination unreachable on non-routable packets:
The NIC router now responds with an ICMP "destination unreachable" packet to
packets that are not routable at an interface with a domain.
For more information, have a look at the _os/src/server/nic_router/README_
file. Examples can be found in the run scripts
_dde_linux/run/nic_router_uplinks.run_,
_libports/run/nic_router_dyn_config.run_, and _os/run/ping_nic_router.run_.
NIC dump
========
The output level of the NIC dump component can now be configured per protocol
by using the protocol names as attributes: 'eth', 'arp', 'ipv4', 'dhcp',
'udp', 'icmp', and 'tcp'.
The available debug levels are:
:no: Do not print out this protocol.
:name: Print only the protocol name.
:default: Print a short summary of the most important header values.
:all: Print all available header values.
Additionally, you can set a default debug level for protocols that are not
configured using the 'default' attribute.
For more information, please refer to _os/src/server/nic_dump/README_.
GUI stack
#########
With Sculpt becoming more and more end-user oriented, Genode's GUI stack came
into focus. It was time to reconsider several interim solutions that worked
well in the past but would not scale up to a modern general-purpose OS. Two
concrete examples are the support of scalable fonts and Unicode characters. In
the past, Genode used to restrict textual output to the Latin-1 character set
and employed pixel-based fonts only. The current release overcomes these
limitations by featuring completely new text-output facilities.
UTF-8 support and improved text rendering
=========================================
The UTF-8 text encoding overcomes the severely limited code-point range of the
ASCII and Latin-1 character sets by representing characters by a varying
number of bytes. Today, UTF-8 is generally considered as the standard encoding
for text. The new UTF-8 decoder at _os/util/utf8.h_ clears the path for
Genode's native GUI components to follow suit. The first beneficiary is
Genode's graphical terminal, which has become able to display Unicode
characters and pass user input as UTF-8-encoded data to its terminal-session
client.
Terminal enhancements
=====================
Speaking of the graphical terminal, the current incarnation got a welcome
overhaul. First, we reduced its complexity by removing obsolete features like
built-in keyboard-layout handling, which are no longer needed when combining
the terminal with our modern input-filter component. Furthermore, the terminal
has become dynamically resizeable, forwarding screen-size changes to the
terminal client. Should the client be a Noux runtime, such a change is
reflected to the running application as a SIG_WINCH signal. The application -
e.g., Vim - responds to the signal by requesting the new terminal size.
Finally, the terminal protocol was changed from 'linux' escape sequences to
'screen' escape sequences in the anticipation of making the terminal more
flexible in the future.
Text rendering
==============
Throughout Genode, many GUI components reused the text-output utilities
of the nitpicker GUI server. These utilities, however, relied on a simple
pixel font format. To make the text output more flexible, nitpicker's text
painter located at _nitpicker_gfx/text_painter.h_ has been replaced by a
completely new implementation that decouples the font format from the
glyph rendering and takes UTF-8 strings as input. In the process, the glyph
rendering got a lot more sophisticated, supporting horizontal sub-pixel
positioning and filtering.
Font-format support
===================
To remove the omnipresent use of fixed-size pixel fonts throughout Genode,
the following new components entered the picture:
First, the new 'ttf_font' library implements nitpicker's font interface by
using the TrueType renderer of the STB single-header library.
Second, the new 'vfs_ttf' VFS plugin uses the 'ttf_font' library to export a
rendered TrueType font as a virtual file system. The various font properties
as well as the actual glyph images become accessible as regular files. This
way, an application that needs to draw text can read the glyph data directly
from its VFS instead of depending on a font-rendering library.
Third, the new 'Vfs_font' utility located at _gems/include/gems/vfs_font.h_
implements nitpicker's font interface by obtaining the glyphs from the
component-local VFS. It is complemented by the 'Cached_font' utility, which
implements an LRU glyph cache.
With this infrastructure in place, several existing GUI components could
be updated, most prominently the graphical terminal and the menu-view
widget-rendering engine. By facilitating the VFS as interface for propagating
glyph data, components no longer need to manage fonts and their configuration
individually. They just access their VFS. When integrating the component into
a scenario, one can decide whether to mount a font-rendering library directly
at the component, or - alternatively - route a file-system session to a
central font server. The latter is just a regular VFS server with the fonts
mounted as pseudo file systems. Since the glyph renderer is a VFS plugin, it
could be replaced by another implementation in the future without touching any
component.
Modernized API for input-event processing
=========================================
Genode's input-session interface changed very little over the years. Even
though it received evolutionary enhancements from time to time, its design
resembled a traditional C-style interface from the medieval era. We found that
the interface left too much room for interpretation. In particular, the meta
data per event type was defined in a rather ad-hoc way, which raised
uncertainties. For example, is a button-press event accompanied with a
positional value or not? To remove these uncertainties, the current release
replaces the 'Input::Event', with a new implementation that facilitates a safe
way of accessing event meta data. Besides this design change, there is one
noteworthy semantic change as well. With the new interface, symbolic character
information are provided along with their corresponding press events rather
than as distinct events, which - according to our practical findings - greatly
simplifies the consumer side of the 'Input::Event' interface.
Improved keyboard-focus handling
================================
The nitpicker GUI server multiplexes one screen among multiple GUI clients in
a secure way. One aspect remained underdeveloped so far, which is the keyboard
focus handling. Nitpicker's 'Session:focus' call previously triggered a one-off
focus change at call time. This focus change did not pass the same code paths
as a focus change triggered by a "focus" ROM update, which led to
inconsistencies.
The new version changes the implementation of 'Session::focus' such that the
relationship of the caller and the focused session is preserved beyond the
call time. Whenever the calling session is focused in the future, the
specified session will receive the focus instead. So 'Session::focus' no
longer represents a single operation but propagates the information about the
inter-session relationship. This information is taken into account whenever
the focus is evaluated regardless of how the change is triggered. This makes
the focus handling in scenarios like the window manager more robust.
Device drivers
##############
NVMe storage devices
====================
Since NVMe devices have become common in contemporary systems, it is time to
provide a driver for such devices on Genode. With this release, we introduce a
component that is able to drive consumer-grade NVMe storage devices, i.e.,
there is no support for namespace management or other enterprise-grade
features. For now, to keep things simple, the driver uses the device in an
old-fashioned way and uses only one I/O queue with at most 128 entries. That
is to say it does not exploit the parallelism necessary to unlock the full
potential of NVMe storage. Nonetheless, it performs well. The following
snippet illustrates its configuration:
!<start name="nvme_drv">
! <resource name="ram" quantum="8M"/>
! <provides><service name="Block"/></provides>
! <config>
! <report namespace="yes"/>
! <policy label_prefix="client1" writeable="yes"/>
! </config>
!</start>
The component will generate a report, which contains all active namespaces, if
reporting is enabled by setting the 'namespace' attribute of the '<report>'
node to 'yes'. A report may look like the following example:
!<controller model="QEMU NVMe Ctrl" serial="FNRD">
! <namespace id="1" block_count="32768" block_size="512"/>
!</controller>
For an example on how to integrate this component, please have a look at the
_repos/os/run/nvme.run_ script.
While implementing the NVMe driver, a new component for testing block-sessions
was used. In contrast to the already existing 'blk_bench' and 'blk_cli'
components, it features a variety of different test patterns, which can be
selected in its configuration and can be used to test a block component more
thoroughly. For more information please refer to
_repos/os/src/app/block_tester/README_
NXP i.MX SoC
============
We extended the Linux kernel driver port for Ethernet cards found in NXP i.MX
SoC, which was introduced in the previous release. Now does it not only
support i.MX6Q SoC based boards like the Wandboard, but the i.MX53 and i.MX6SX
SoC as well. The new driver was successfully tested with the i.MX53 Quick
Start Board and the Nitrogen6 SOLOX. The latter board even contains two
Ethernet cards. But due to technical limitations of the board design, the same
driver instance has to be used for both cards. Currently, the driver is
tweaked to run on different boards via its configuration ROM. When no
configuration is provided, it appropriates the values for successfully
executing on the Wandboard. The following is an example configuration for the
i.MX53:
! <config>
! <card name="fec0" type="fsl,imx25-fec" mii="rmii" irq="87" mmio="0x63fec000"/>
! </config>
As a side effect of enabling networking on the Nitrogen6 SOLOX, support for
GPIO based signals has been added to the framework too. The existing GPIO
driver for i.MX53 SoC got extended to additionally support the i.MX6 family.
There are some known limitations when using different drivers like Ethernet
and SD-card drivers on the Wandboard right now. At the moment, those drivers
adjust clock parameters and I/O pin configurations independently from each
other, which can lead to inconsistencies. We plan to address those issues with
the implementation of a platform driver for the i.MX6 SoC family.
Improved USB-storage driver
===========================
We improved the stability of the USB-storage driver (usb_block_drv) and
made it compatible with a lot more devices as the driver has become a pivotal
ingredient of the Sculpt scenario. Due to the changes, the way the driver
operates has changed. On the one hand, now it first tries to use 10-byte
Command Descriptor Blocks (CDB) in its SCSI layer and will only switch to
16-byte CDBs when it encounters a device whose blocks cannot be completely
accessed via the former descriptor size. On the other hand, because some
tested devices stopped working after issuing a USB device reset, the reset was
made optional. By setting the 'reset_device' attribute in the '<config>' node
to 'yes', the driver is instructed to perform the USB device reset.
Libraries and applications
##########################
Packaged Qt5 framework
======================
We created package recipes for all previously ported Qt5 libraries and their
dependencies and adapted the run scripts accordingly. Please note that the
host tools needed for building Qt applications (moc, rcc, uic) are not built
automatically anymore, but need to be built and installed manually with the
new 'tool/tool_chain_qt5' script.
Java language support
=====================
Over the course of the past year, we started to look into Java support for
Genode with the ultimate goal of porting an existing Java Virtual Machine
(JVM), which translates and executes Java byte code, to Genode. After
investigating possible JVM candidates, it became obvious that
[http://openjdk.java.net - OpenJDK] is the only viable option when looking for
a functional, maintained, feature complete, and open-source Java SDK.
Therefore, we decided upon OpenJDK version 9 and started to port OpenJDK's
HotSpot virtual machine.
In the first step, we followed the approach to enable HotSpot's internal
Just-in Time (JIT) compiler, which translates byte code into machine code and
is the option with the most to offer performance wise. But we also wanted
support for ARM platforms and soon realized, there was almost no JIT compiler
support for ARM other than for Linux. The Linux version is deeply integrated
into the Linux system libraries (e.g., glibc), which makes it very hard to
bring the compiler onto Genode. For example, Genode uses FreeBSD's libc and
that would now have to offer glibc semantics.
After additional research, we found the so-called interpreter version of the
HotSpot VM. This version does not compile byte code, but interprets and
emulates the code at runtime. It is of course slower than the JIT compiler
version, but also machine-architecture independent, so the same HotSpot VM can
be compiled for x86 and ARM platforms. With the JVM running on Genode, we
added networking and file-system access support via Genode's VFS layer. Note,
there is no graphical toolkit support as of now, but most standard library
classes should work. Also, the byte code has to be compiled on a different
host system (e.g., Linux, *BSD) as of now, since we did not bring the Java
compiler to Genode.
To give Java a spin, a run script can be found under _ports/run/java.run_.
Ada language support
====================
Support for components and libraries written in the Ada/SPARK programming
language experienced a rework with the final goal of seamless integration with
the base framework. We added a new _ada_ library, which contains a (currently
minimal) runtime taken from the sources of our GCC port and thus is always
consistent with the tool chain in use. It is built as a shared library
_ada.lib.so_ that needs to be added to the list of boot modules.
The example in _libports/src/test/ada_ showcases the implementation of an Ada
component using a custom library _test-ada_, which is also implemented in Ada.
Seoul VMM on NOVA
=================
The Seoul/Vancouver VMM - introduced to Genode with release 11.11 - received
some renovations to be able to run recent Linux VMs. Namely the output of the
guest during early boot is now visible and the network models got revised.
Additionally, the Seoul VMM has been packaged and can be used in Sculpt.
Ported software
===============
The [https://dnsprivacy.org/wiki/display/DP/DNS+Privacy+Daemon+-+Stubby - Stubby]
DNS daemon has been ported to begin experimentations with DNS as a native
service. There is a tendency for DNS configuration frameworks to diverge
between operating systems and releases, an inconvenience that is magnified
when maintaining virtual machines. Name-server configuration via DHCP has been
the only constant, so hosting DNS natively and configuring virtual-machines
with the *nic_router* DHCP server presents itself as a viable solution to the
guest resolver quagmire. Expect DNS services in later Sculpt releases.
Platforms
#########
Accessing PCI via ECAM/MMCONF
=============================
The platform driver on x86 is trusted with guarding access to PCI
devices. Up to now, I/O ports have been used to configure the PCI subsystem.
On modern x86 architectures, PCI devices can be configured by using Memory
Mapped I/O (MMIO). This method was introduced with PCI Express and is called
Enhanced Configuration Access Mechanism (ECAM). For Each PCI device a separate
4 KiB MMIO page exists to serves as the configuration interface between OS and
PCI device.
The exact location of all the 4K MMIO pages of the PCI devices is machine
specific and must be determined during the bootstrap phase. The ACPI driver on
Genode is in charge of this procedure and reports the location of the
ECAM/MMCONF region to the platform driver via the 'acpi' ROM.
Besides using a modern PCI interface, switching to ECAM/MMCON served to ease
the execution of Genode/hw on top of the Muen separation kernel.
Kernel-agnostic platform-information handling
=============================================
Up to now, special kernel-specific information was propagated to components
such as Virtualbox, the Seoul VMM, and the timer by reusing the
kernel-provided data structures. For Genode/NOVA, the hypervisor info page
(HIP) was exported as an ordinary Genode ROM. With the rise of Sculpt and the
packaging of components in a - as far as possible - kernel-independent way,
the propagation of kernel-specific information became a stumbling block.
With this release we abandon the 'hypervisor_info_page' ROM of Genode/NOVA and
replace it with a Genode ROM called 'platform_info'. The 'platform_info' ROM
is planned to contain solely information about the host hardware, which may
not be gathered otherwise by Genode components. In the current state it
contains information required by VMMs, namely whether AMD SVM or Intel VMX is
available and usable. Additionally, the ROM contains information about the
frequency of the time stamp counter.
Updated seL4 kernel to version 9.0.1
====================================
Thanks to Hinnerk van Bruinehsen, the seL4 version used by Genode has been
updated to 9.0.1.
Updated Muen separation kernel
==============================
With the addition of memory-mapped access to the PCI config-space in Genode,
base-hw subjects on Muen now only see the effectively assigned physical
devices. This makes it possible to run Genode in parallel with other subjects
and to pass-through different PCI devices for each instance.
The Muen update also brings a much simplified subject info structure plus some
tweaks to the Muen system policy XML format to facilitate easier integration
of new hardware platform specifications.
Build system and tools
######################
Validating 3rd-party code downloads via SHA256
==============================================
This release removes support for verifying source code of third-party ports
with the SHA1 hash algorithm. Last year, SHA1 was banished as a credible
cryptographic hash function after the demonstration of a full collision
attack. Since the
[https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/14.05 - 14.05 release],
port files have been verified using SHA1, this release replaces all file
digests with SHA256 digests. Any port definitions maintained in external
repositories are required to make these replacements as well. No collisions
have been discovered against source code archives but nonetheless there is an
obligation to widen our margin of safety.
Creating GPT-based disk images by default
=========================================
Up to now Genode's run tool was able to create x86 bootable images in three
flavours:
* Either as ISO bootable by BIOS legacy - 'image/iso', or as
* GPT partitioned disk image only bootable by UEFI - 'image/uefi', or as
* MBR partitioned disk image only bootable by BIOS legacy - 'image/disk'.
With Sculpt came the demand to have a single image type that is in principle
bootable by both UEFI and BIOS legacy. Additionally with Sculpt, we began to
prefer working with GPT partitioned devices.
In the light of the new demands, we changed the 'image/disk' run tool support
to create a GPT partitioned disk image bootable by a legacy BIOS and by UEFI.
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