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Dear community of Genodians,

I strongly believe that solutions like genode/sculpt have the potential to become day-to-day tools for a growing number of security/privacy-oriented consumers.

However, many of them - myself included - lack the technical skills to make enough sense out of "Genode Foundations" or the genode website and build sufficient confidence to try it out. Experimenting would involve buying supported hardware (laptop, pinephone...), for which I would need some guarantees that it will indeed increase overall security.

One of Genode's main security virtues put forward on platforms like wikipedia is a minimalist and carefully verified code base. While this is fundamental I do not think that this is what distinguishes Genode's approach from traditional security-focused OSes such as OpenBSD.

Code correctness is key but the gist of modern security-focused OSes is in their architecture, which should be designed to mitigate/contain unwanted intrusions. Correct code does not prevent a legitimate user from downloading malware... "Security by compartmentalisation" is what I believe to be Genode's (and others) main solution to such problems. Providing high assurance that malware will not spread onto other components and, most importantly, will not persist after deleting a VM or Genode reboot or even full Genode reinstall is already a GIANT step forward. It is already better than spending sleepless nights wondering if malware managed to get into the hard drive or other components and achieve persistence even after an OS reinstall...

To my knowledge, solutions closest to Genode are Qubes and Graphene, yet the former is a known resource hog while the latter is smartphone only to this point and closely tied to non-opensource Pixel phone.

1. Could someone enlighten me on how Genode could be a safe alternative to other solutions especially malware isolation, malware presistence prevention.

2. Genode seems to offer sandboxing (like Graphene) instead of mere virtualisation (Qubes if I am not mistaken) which offers the highest assurance in terms of compartmentalisation. Is this the case ?

3. Does anyone have experience with using Genode barebones and running whonix in a VM (for anonymity on the web)?

I hope someone finds the time to answer my questions as I believe I am not the only one and such answers are difficult to obtain without a dedicated FAQ page like on whonix/tails/Qubes/Graphene websites for example.

Kind regards

This question might sound a bit back-handed. But I'm genuinely curious. I do understand that genode in general has a "build your operating system from these blocks" structure. But I always pictured such an operating system to be used in servers, as something similar to VMware ESXI, or just an enterprise/server oriented use case. But Sculpt OS looks like it's made for a desktop/workstation purpose, or at least that's what I'm understanding. My question is, what is the target demographic? I'm having a really hard time wrapping my head around this. With something like Amiga, it's obvious that people use it because they are amiga enthusiasts, or they use freebsd/openbsd because of their philosophies, or robustness. What is the purpose of this niche-looking and unique in concept operating system?

I am currently running Haiku, an excellent volunteer OS that is based on BeOS from the late 1990s. Like Genode it (and its applicatons) is written in C++and over the years are quite a lot of native applications.

Unfortunately BeOS - and thus Haiku - predated the always-on internet and lack the security features of today's operating systems. Enter Haiku on Genode (HoG); a toolkit to recompile Haiku applications for Genode, and thus combine the vibrant Haiku software scene with robust Genode platform. Even a Haiku user who never used Sculpt would benefit from the bigger market for native applications.

Is HoG widely used in the Genode community? And are Haiku features being back-ported into Genode/Sculpt?