Hi Paul,
Well, february 2013 is at our door now, and I would like to remember us of the plan for it according to our 2013 roadmap:
-Low-latency audio support The current audio_out-session interface was our first shot into the direction of audio processing. To enable use cases where streaming audio and sporadic sounds must be accommodated at the same time, we need to revise our approach.
This line of work (conducted by Sebastian Sumpf) has been merged into master. See the following commits for more details:
https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/commit/238d6a29c508ec776137362bc71363a1...
https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/commit/47bb48bdd6fa688cd91585412326e1f6...
https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/commit/5aea55e4172ce6ff9641e639bb3e24ea...
We still need to thoroughly test the new solution on real hardware and at least one virtualization solution (i.e., VirtualBox). For the release, we plan to document the design of the new interface and the rationale behind it.
-IOMMU support on NOVA
This topic is being worked on by Alexander Böttcher. See here:
https://github.com/alex-ab/genode/commits/nova_iommu_v0
In addition, Alex largely refined the base-nova code to enable dynamic workloads on this kernel. This work includes pretty substantial changes of the kernel. These changes are available in his fork of the kernel:
https://github.com/alex-ab/NOVA/commits/r1
-First steps of user-interface concept --UI concept for pleasant working environment --Tiled window manager --Terminal improvements (e.g., scroll buffer) --Noux improvements (e.g., signals)
These points remain largely unaddressed. I expect that we will see progress on them after FOSDEM. I will certainly be involved in these topics.
-Improved x86 virtualization support --Improved virtualization support (Vancouver on NOVA)
There is an open pull request about this topic:
https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/pull/582
Udo Steinberg agreed to revisit the patches to incorporate my feedback. After that, we will integrate them into staging and document and test the new version of the Vancouver VMM.
In addition to the mentioned topics, the February release will bring principal support for the Exynos5-based Arndale platform for our custom base-hw kernel. See Martin Stein's topic branch:
https://github.com/m-stein/genode/commits/arndale
Regards Norman