Monthly Archive:: May 2014

I have a better solution. No registry hacks required!

I'm still waiting on the Tizen phones Samsung has been promising for years. Even though it's essentially 'TouchWiz OS' (in other words, cringe-worthy), it's still an alternative operating system I would love to play with.

The just released Genode version 14.05 comes with new tools that greatly improve the interoperability of the framework with existing software. Together with a new process-local virtual file system embedded in the C runtime, this change should clear the way to scale Genode well beyond the current state. Besides these infrastructural changes, the release comes with a new block-level encryption facility, enables USB 3.0 on x86, introduces SMP support to the base-hw kernel, enables real-time scheduling on the NOVA hypervisor, and adds guest-addition support for VirtualBox on NOVA.

After the feature-rich release 14.02, the Genode developers took the chance to thoroughly revisit the tooling and overall structure of the framework. The goal was to improve its scalability with steadily growing amount of third-party software combined with the framework. Genode-based system scenarios combine the work of up to 70 open-source projects. However, until now, the framework lacked proper tools to manage such third-party code in a uniform way. In particular, upgrades of third-party software were poorly supported. To overcome those problems, the project took the wonderful Nix package manager as inspiration, created a set of new tools, and reworked the build system to make the porting and use of third-party software much more enjoyable and robust.

Most ported 3rd-party software relies on a C runtime. Genode offers a fairly complete libc based on FreeBSD's libc. However, translating the POSIX API to the Genode API is not straight forward. For example, Genode does not even have a central virtual file system service. Hence, different applications call for different ways of how POSIX calls are translated to the Genode world. Until now, the different use cases were accommodated by specially crafted libc plugins that tailored the behavior of the C runtime per application. However, as the number of applications grew, the number of libc plugins has grown too. In the new version, the framework consolidates the existing libc plugins to a generic virtual file system (VFS) implementation. In contrast to a traditional VFS that resides in the OS kernel, Genode's VFS is a plain library embedded in the C runtime. To the C program, it offers the view on a regular file system. But under the hood, it assembles the virtual file system out of Genode resources such as file-system sessions, terminal sessions, or block sessions. Since each process has its own VFS configured by its parent process, the access to resources can be tailored individually per process.

In addition to the infrastructural changes, the new version comes with plenty of platform-related improvements. Genode's custom kernel platform for ARM devices named base-hw has received multi-processor support and a new memory management that alleviates the need to maintain identity mappings in the kernel. The NOVA microhypervisor has been adapted to make static priority scheduling usable for Genode. Thereby the kernel becomes more attractive for general-purpose OS workloads on the x86 architecture. Also related to NOVA, the project has continued its line of work to run VirtualBox on this kernel by enabling support for guest-additions, namely shared folders, mouse-pointer synchronization, and real-time clock synchronization.

In line with the project's road map, the new version features a first solution for using encrypted block devices. The developers decided to use NetBSD's cryptographic device driver (CDG) as a Genode component. One motivation behind the use of CDG was to intensify the work with the rump kernel project, which allows the execution of NetBSD kernel subsystems at user level. After the project successfully used rump kernels as file-system providers with the previous release, extending the use of rump kernels for other purposes was simply intriguing.

These and more topics are covered in the comprehensive release documentation for Genode 14.05.

I've been looking at a lot of these 8bit fonts because of recent emulation efforts. I'd like to throw Visi On's fonts into the fray, too.

I still have no idea why Apple is buying these guys. Then again, that's probably why I'm not a billionaire.

Coincidentally, I find it highly entertaining that technically, this is now an Apple product.

As a follow up to this and this story - Steven Troughton-Smith goes a step further.

Software sucks. It really, really sucks. I have yet to meet a piece of software that didn't make me go "...eh." several times per hour - whether it be a videogame, a browser, or an operating system.

Like most of you, I've always wanted want to code and compile 68k Mac OS applications in OS X that work on System 1.1. This question kept me up night after night, but thanks to Steven Troughton-Smith, we now know that it is, indeed, possible. It started with a 68k application on System 6. Not long after, he managed to compile a simple application that worked on System 1.1. This test application's code is available on github.

This is possible using ksherlock's MPW Emulator, which, as the name implies, is an emulator that allows you to run the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop on any OS X 10.9 system (a case-insensitive HFS+ volume is required).

I'm glad this matter has been settled. In all seriousness, while the number of useful applications for this is probably limited, it's still very cool.

An incredibly detailed look at the state of iOS and OS X development. Grab a drink.

Remember back when GNOME and KDE dominated Linux desktops? Seems like a long time ago, doesn't it? Yet it was only three years ago, in April 2011, that GNOME 3 was released. Its radically redesigned interface shook up everyone. Some eagerly adopted it. Others left GNOME.

In this brief review I take a fresh look at GNOME today, as it's currently distributed in several popular Linux distributions.

This actually reminds me a lot of how contemporary technology media look at smartphones and such. They often have little to no experience with the breadth of mobile technology that came before the iPhone and Android, and as a consequence, they treat everything as new, revolutionary, and 'owned' - even though virtually everything has been taken from somewhere else.

The Neo900 project is seeing some major organisational difficulties, which takes resources away from the actual technical stuff. Progress on that front is still being made, though, and this update details some of it.

Everybody's favourite not-Google search engine - DuckDuckGo - has received a complete redesign and a whole slew of new features.

Compared to today's Google, it looks incredibly clean, and the new features - for once - do not get in the way of the stuff that was already there. It must be hard to redesign and add new features to a search engine that is more or less known for being the opposite of Google, but I think they have managed to pull it off.

Arrakis is a research operating system from University of Washinton, built as a fork of Barrelfish.

The first public version of Arrakis has been released recently, and the code is hosted on GitHub.