diff --git a/doc/news.txt b/doc/news.txt index ae7926e6bff..b624383ec43 100644 --- a/doc/news.txt +++ b/doc/news.txt @@ -4,6 +4,43 @@ =========== +Genode OS Framework release 15.02 | 2015-01-27 +############################################## + +| Version 15.02 extends the base-hw kernel with ARM-virtualization support, +| introduces a highly modularized tool kit for automated testing, adds +| support for the USB Armory platform, and improves the performance and +| stability of VirtualBox on Genode/NOVA. + +Most of the previous releases were motivated by our desire for features that +we deemed as fundamentally important to use Genode as a general-purpose +system. Now that we have reached most of the feature set that we longed after, +the project adjusts its focus. According to our recently published +[http://genode.org/about/road-map - roadmap], the underlying theme of the +current development shifted towards the cultivation of the existing feature +set rather than the introduction of new functionality. The current release +perfectly reflects this change. It introduces a highly modular tool kit for +scaling up the project's automated testing efforts and comes with stability +and performance improvements all over the place. In particular, we are happy +to report substantial performance gains of our version of VirtualBox running +on NOVA. + +As a second focus of the version 15.02, our custom base-hw kernel platform +received a lot of attention. The most prominent news is the added support +for virtualization on ARM. This line of work has been conducted and refined over +the time span of more than a year and took much of our prior experience with +the NOVA virtualization architecture and ARM TrustZone into account. This +experience resulted in a novel microhypervisor design with an extremely +tiny foot print with respect to the added complexity on the account of +virtualization support. In fact, less than 1000 lines of code had to be added +to the root of the trusted computing base. Besides virtualization +support, our kernel's scheduler got refined to take IPC relationships into +account while additionally gaining support for the USB Armory hardware platform. + +These and many more improvements are covered in more detail by the +[http:/documentation/release-notes/15.02 - release documentation of version 15.02...] + + Road Map for 2015 | 2015-01-14 ##############################