The release 25.11 wraps up our year of “rigidity, clarity, performance” with a bouquet of vast under-the-hood improvements. Genode’s custom kernel received special tuning of its new CPU scheduler for Sculpt-OS workloads, and became much more scalable with respect to virtual-memory management. Combined, those efforts visibly boost the performance of Sculpt OS on performance-starved hardware like the PinePhone or the i.MX8-based MNT Reform laptop. On account of improving clarity, our new configuration format – now named human-inclined data (HID) – proliferates throughout Genode’s tooling. We are also happy to report that almost all Genode components have become interoperable with both XML and HID by now.
↫ Genode OS Framework 25.11 release notes
The Genode Framework 25.11 also brings a major change to how important shared components that aren’t strictly part of the framework are handled, such as ports like libSDL, sqlite, or gnutls. Before, these could only be built with the Genode build system, which was suboptimal because this isn’t designed for building individual components. Several changes have been made to now enable the use of multiple build systems and the Goa SDK, which should make it a lot easier to these crucial components to become the responsibility of wider parts of the community.
There’s way more, of course, such as the usual driver improvements, including the addition of support for serial-to-USB adapters.
Does Genode actually do anything? I’ve booted it as a VM, and it was clearly there, but I’ve never worked out how to do anything with it.
I’m not sure, but it looks like a set of building blocks, like Legos
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45384653
At least that was the impression I got. Maybe something like Gentoo, but that is beyond my expertise.
Genode is the building blocks whereas Sculpt is the usable “distro” for us mere mortals. Sculpt is starting to benefit from a sparse collection of apps, Falkon Browser being the most obvious, but still a lot of things have to run in their native OS using its virtual machine support.
Sculpt still always feels a little bit clunky to me because AFAIK you have to manually configure all the services. They do provide a few demo scenarios, but I didn’t see one that provides an actually useful desktop environment.