Updated packages for Sculpt CE

March 20 2019 by Alexander Böttcher

With the image release of Genode's Sculpt CE yesterday, it is time to report about some updated packages of mine.

Disposal Firefox VMs

The disposal VM packages got updated to Sculpt CE and also contain the newest Firefox 66 version. Additionally, thanks to Sebastian Sumpf, the Seoul version got scroll wheel support.

 +
   -> Depot
      -> alex-ab
        -> Virtual machines ...
          -> firefox@seoul (19.03-66.0.0)
          -> firefox@vbox5 (19.03-66.0.0)

Advanced ACPI support for Sculpt CE

Additionally, I provide two new packages, which use our acpica component. With this component you can poweroff and reset a machine and you can monitor various ACPI events of your notebook. The version of the component I used is not the latest one of the Genode master branch, but the last one which is known to work well enough for the Lenovo notebooks surrounded by me.

 +
   -> Depot
      -> alex-ab
        -> System
          -> acpica
          -> battery

The acpica package just contains the component without any GUI interface. As soon as you configure it, you will notice that this component requires quite a lot of low-level access to the system to work. Actually, it is a fully fledged ACPI driver. Now is a good time to equip yourself with a good understanding of the system resources you are going to grant access to. My suggestion looks like this:

 Direct memory-mapped I/O
   -> raw hardware access
 Direct port I/O
   -> raw hardware access
 Direct device interrupts
   -> raw hardware access
 Device access
   -> ACPI
 ROM (platform info)
   -> platform information
 ROM (system)
   -> system status
 Report
   -> system reports

If your machine is supported, the driver will report all ACPI related information via the system report, as you configured. When you use an inspect window, the reports will be available via /report/runtime/acpica/acpi_*. Please consult the acpica README for a basic introduction.

With the ROM (system) configuration above, you granted read access to the

/config/system file. When you open this file you will see the following content

 <!-- supported states: "poweroff" or "reset" when acpica started -->            
 <!-- Note: power down your persistent Genode applications & VMs beforehand on your own ! -->
 <system state=""/>

The acpica component monitors this file and will react upon changes. So, if you now set the state to reset or poweroff and write this file - the acpica component will try to accomplish the task - IMMEDIATELY ! So, make your changes persistent beforehand, e.g. powerdown your VMs beforehand.

The battery package contains, in addition to the acpica component, a very simple nitpicker GUI client, which shows graphically the battery state. The report location of the acpica component changed now to /report/runtime/battery/acpi_*, according to the battery package name.

You will notice, that now one report is missing, the acpica_battery report. This report is consumed by the GUI tool, however the content can be still accessed via a button in the battery GUI.

Please note, since the two packages contain the same ACPI driver, you can NOT run them in parallel. Just use one package at a time.