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.

In the light of this year’s roadmap focus on “rigidity, clarity, performance”, Sculpt OS 25.10 looks the same as the version 25.04 but might feel different as it includes countless under-the-hood improvements of the two preceding framework releases 25.05 and 25.08. User interaction on performance-starved platforms like the PinePhone has become visibly smoother thanks our recent CPU scheduling advances. The streamlined block-storage stack combined with various refinements of the package-installation mechanism make the on-target installation of 3rd-party components a bliss. Regarding supported hardware, we steadily follow the tireless work of the Linux kernel community. All PC driver components using Linux kernel code are now consistently based on kernel version 6.12.

↫ Sculpt OS 25.10 release announcement

There’s also an optional brand new configuration format, which optionally replaces Scultp’s use of XML for this purpose. Norman Feske, one of the co-founders of Genode Labs, published an article detailing how to test this new format, which also goes much deeper into how it works. For Sculpt OS’ 25.10 release, Alexander Böttcher has also released an experimental image with five different kernel to choose from. The image is for PC, and works as a live system so there’s no need to install it to explore Sculpt OS.

Speaking of Alexander Böttcher, he also published an article about improvements and changes to Sculpt OS’ lockscreen component. This component has existed for a very long time, and has been improved considerably over the years, and Böttcher’s article details how to install it, configure it, and use it.