Hi Ben,
By the way, Norman, what would be a good project for me to get started on while I'm waiting for the people who understand the AHCI and part_blk drivers?
[off-topic] Please let me raise your awareness about mailing-list etiquette. Short top postings are generally not considered as polite. Keep in mind that each email you send to the list arrives at the inboxes of all subscribers. Hence, please be considerate not to abuse the mailing list as an instant messaging tool.
Regarding your question, I have following recommendations:
* If you are interested in using Genode on the Raspberry Pi, go this way. It is fun. Use it as a chance to learn about device drivers. Even if Jeroen has developed a GPIO driver already, I would still recommend you to start poking around with GPIO pins - just for the sake of learning.
Download and study the reference manuals for the SoC and board of the Raspberry Pi.
Try to understand how GPIO programming works. There are excellent resources available to get started. For example:
https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi
The examples start with simple things like a blinking LED. Apply the gained knowledge to write a Genode program that accesses the GPIO registers using an IO_MEM session. Look at the existing drivers to see how it is done.
* For the work that you initially wanted to pursue, the lack of a proper file system and block driver is not a show stopper. You mentioned your interest to port libraries and applications. You can do that just fine without a persistent file system. Just look at the large body of software that we already ported (e.g., Qt5 with the Arora web browser, the entire tool chain, the GNU tools, etc.). For porting, we normally place files in a TAR archive mounted into the VFS of the ported application. Additionally, there is a RAM file system available if the application needs to write files.
If you are genuinely interested in contributing to Genode, the best way would be to document and publish your steps, e.g., in the form of a blog or a Wiki. This would possibly enable future newcomers to get started more easily.
Regards Norman