Genode - Release notes for the Genode OS Framework 22.11
With version 22.11, we pursued two new exploratory topics as we envisioned on the project's road map for this year, namely the use of the framework for hardware-software co-design work, and principally enabling suspend/resume functionality on PCs.
A decade ago, we explored the combination of Genode with FPGA technology for the first time. Our interest in this direction got reignited two years ago when we started enabling Genode on a board based on the Xilinx Zynq, which combines an ARMv7 SoC with FPGA fabric. This line of work eventually culminated in new development work flows for creating hardware IP cores and Genode components in tandem. Section Hardware-software co-design with Genode on Xilinx Zynq covers the results of this line of work.
The second largely exploratory topic is the practical use of sleep states on PC hardware, which - until this point - remained rather mysterious to us. Section Low-level mechanism for suspend/resume on PC platforms reports on our findings and the forthcoming integration of this feature into Genode.
Besides the exploration work, the profound enhancement of our Intel GPU multiplexer stands out. As detailed in Section Hardware-accelerated graphics with Intel GEN12+ GPUs, the new version supports up-to-date GEN12+ GPUs, comes with numerous robustness and performance improvements, and got adapted to Genode's new uniform driver infrastructure.
The latter point brings us to the most elaborate development under the hood of the framework, which is the great unification of the device-driver interfaces across all supported architectures. Section Uniform use of new platform-driver interface wraps up this intensive line of work, which left no PC-related driver unturned.
A recurring theme throughout this year is the use of Genode on the PinePhone. The current release is no exception. Sections Emerging Sculpt OS variant for the PinePhone and PinePhone drivers for audio, camera, and power control report on the progress at the user-facing side as well as the driver-related achievements digging deep into the realms of power management, audio, and the camera.
Among the many further topics of the current release are virtualization on PC and ARM (Sections ARM virtual machine monitor and Seoul VMM), plenty of device-driver improvements, and enhanced tooling that makes the framework ever more enjoyable to use (Section Build system and tools).