[okl4-developer] Announcing availability of OKL4 2.1 & OK Linux 2.6.23.17

[Abi Nourai]

Hello all,

I'm pleased to announce the release of OKL4 2.1 for ARM and IA-32  
processors to the OK Labs Developers Community.

OKL4 2.1 represents a significant milestone in OKL4's evolution, and  
brings with it a plethora of new innovation and enhancements to our  
core product.  For a taste of what's new, check out a summary of the  
changelog further down.

With OKL4 2.1, we're also making available OK Linux 2.6.23.17 (based  
off Linux 2.6.23).  And in response to the needs of our rapidly  
growing Developers Community, we're also releasing a set of three user  
manuals covering the OKL4 kernel, root server (Iguana) and system- 
configuration tool (Elfweaver).

To download the newly released versions of OKL4, OK Linux and  
associated user manuals, please head on over to http://wiki.ok- 
labs.com/ and visit the 'Downloads' section.  We will continue to make  
available past releases, and in particular, OKL4 1.5.2 which serves as  
the most current release for MIPS targets.


A summary of some of the key changes between OKL4 2.0 and 2.1 is  
provided in the following:
     * Introduction of our capability-based security model
     * Additional reductions to static and dynamic memory footprint
     * Additional performance improvements
         - Enhanced virtualization of interrupts to further improve  
interrupt latency
         - Introduced a new O(1) scheduler designed with multi- 
threaded and multi-core systems in mind
         - Further performance improvements made to OKL4 and OK Linux  
on IA-32
     * Extended OKL4 with kernel support for synchronization (mutex)  
objects
     * Extended OKL4 with kernel support for deadlock avoidance (via  
priority inheritance)
     * Further enhancements to the OKL4 Driver Framework aimed at  
easing development of device drivers
     * Implementation of POSIX C Library and pthreads functionality  
directly over OKL4


Over the coming weeks, we'll be discussing some of the new things in  
OKL4 2.1 in more detail on the Developers' mailing list, so do stay  
tuned !


On behalf of the OK Labs Team, I'd like to thank all community members  
for their ongoing support of OKL4, and hope that the new release  
serves you well.


Warm regards
Abi