Genode OS Framework release 17.05

With a profoundly updated framework infrastructure such as GCC 6.3, Qt 5.8, and VirtualBox 5.1.22 for NOVA, the just released version 17.05 promises to be a suitable basis for longer-term maintenance and is accompanied with a new edition of the "Genode Foundations" book.

With the mid-year release of Genode, we hope to provide a solid basis for long-living projects built on top of the framework. For this reason, we updated the official tool chain as well as our ports of Qt and VirtualBox to current versions, which are there to stay in the foreseeable future. We also finalized the series of architectural and API-related changes that we started one year ago. The release is accompanied with a new edition of the "Genode Foundations" book that reflects the current state of the framework.

Feature-wise, the most visible improvement is a new approach and the corresponding tooling for package management. While still officially declared as experimental, it already becomes apparent that it will bring Genode to a new level of scalability. Among the many further improvements are the support for the Ada and Nim programming languages, a new timing API, and new tools for monitoring network traffic and CPU load. All changes are covered in full detail in the release documentation of version 17.05...