The release of the operating system Sculpt 22.10 is presented, within which, based on the technologies of the Genode OS Framework, a general-purpose operating system is being developed that can be used by ordinary users to perform everyday tasks. The source texts of the project are distributed under the AGPLv3 license. A LiveUSB image is offered for download, 28 MB in size. Work is supported on systems with Intel processors and graphics subsystem with VT-d and VT-x extensions enabled.
Main innovations:
- Device interrupt management and PCI configuration are more restrictive than the Genode architecture. The change required a large internal rework that affected all drivers and allowed for new optimizations and additional functionality. At the same time, the developers tried to preserve the general behavior when the user works in the system.
- Several significant optimizations have been proposed to speed up startup, increase the throughput of the network subsystem, and increase the responsiveness of the user interface.
- Improved support for hot plugging USB devices. Added the ability to dynamically attach USB devices to virtual machines and detach devices.
- The Chromium browser engine used in the Falkon and Morph browsers offered to the user has been updated.
- The sound driver has been updated to be in sync with code from OpenBSD 7.1.
- Work has begun on adapting Sculpt for mobile phones. Improvements include USB ECM support, Mali-400 GPU, SD card connectivity, telephony and mobile data stack, Morph browser and user interface. Added support for USB smart cards.
The system comes with a Leitzentrale graphical user interface that allows you to perform common system administration tasks. The upper left corner of the GUI displays a menu with tools for managing users, connecting drives, and setting up a network connection. In the center there is a configurator for arranging the filling of the system, which provides an interface in the form of a graph that defines the relationship between system components. The user can interactively remove or add components arbitrarily, defining the composition of the system environment or virtual machines.
At any time, the user can switch to the console management mode, which provides greater flexibility in management. A traditional desktop can be obtained by running a TinyCore Linux distribution in a Linux virtual machine. In this environment, Firefox and Aurora browsers, a Qt-based text editor and various applications are available. The noux environment is offered to run command line utilities.
Genode provides a unified infrastructure for building custom applications running on top of the Linux kernel (32 and 64 bits) or NOVA microkernels (x86 with virtualization), seL4 (x86_32, x86_64, ARM), Muen (x86_64), Fiasco.OC (x86_32, x86_64, ARM), L4ka::Pistachio (IA32, PowerPC), OKL4, L4/Fiasco (IA32, AMD64, ARM), and a direct-executing kernel for ARM and RISC-V platforms. The included paravirtualized Linux kernel L4Linux, running on top of the Fiasco.OC microkernel, allows regular Linux programs to run on Genode. The L4Linux kernel does not interact directly with the hardware, but uses Genode services through a set of virtual drivers.
Various Linux and BSD components were ported for Genode, Gallium3D was supported, Qt, GCC and WebKit were integrated, and hybrid Linux/Genode environments were implemented. A VirtualBox port has been prepared that runs on top of the NOVA microkernel. A large number of applications are adapted to run directly on top of the microkernel and the Noux environment, which provides virtualization at the OS level. To run non-ported programs, it is possible to use the mechanism for creating virtual environments at the level of individual applications, allowing you to run programs in a virtual Linux environment using paravirtualization.
Source: opennet.ru