Hello Sebastian,
What directions are you most excited about?
For 2023 I am of course excited about our upcoming PinePhone field test, where we will use the phone on a daily basis. With the goal to make system updates easy I hope we will find a workflow where bugs can be fixed and features be added quickly in order to make the phone as reliable and fast as we aim for.
with the help of your persistence - thinking of the tricky audio routing, telephony, and mobile data connectivity - we already have come such a long way! Your statement gives me great confidence that Genode will eventually rock the PinePhone. :)
Which topics do you deem as interesting to explore yourself? Do you already happen to have rough plans about 2023?
Can it run Doom? Better question: Can it run Doom3?
I have ported the Doom3 dhewm3 [1] engine to Genode as a Goa [2] project [3] which I used as a meaningful 3D workload in order to test feature completeness and performance of our Intel based 3D stack. By now it runs at 60 FPS on newer Intel hardware, proofing this is a feasible way. Having dug more deeply into the 3D graphics area during the last few years, the Vulkan API comes to mind. The direction Vulkan is taking feels like the right way to go at the moment and I would like to enable support for Vulkan within our Mesa library port. I am still looking for a suitable workload, though.
Thanks for sharing the links to your Doom3 port.
The topics you mentioned are a welcome and natural continuation of the achievements of 2022. I see the confrontation of our GPU driver with heavy workloads as the ultimate proof for its fitness. Your anticipation of more modern GPU APIs fits nicely into the picture. I wonder how concrete your ideas are? Specifically, do you think that Vulkan should get a mention at the road map? If so, how should we frame it best?
Cheers Norman