Hi Lonnie,
My questions stem from the way that VirtualBox currently works on other hosts in that you can have it look at the physical CDROM or an ISO on the hard drive to boot from. Actually, I have been researching VB a bit as well and it seems that there is also a way to make VB boot physical partitions into a VM. This would be very good to have in the NOVA-Genode-VirtualBox design as well.
design-wise, there is no show stopper to do that with our version as well. But some implementation bits are still missing. I am pretty sure that we will support this feature as it is very useful indeed.
As you know, one of my current goals is to basically make a full Type-1 hypervisor from the NOVA-Genode-VirtualBox solution which is functionally similar to the older NOVA v0.3 DEMO but instead have VirtualBox for the VMM's and in a Genode Nitpicker GUI but still retain the VERY NICE keyboard navigation from that demo to switch between VM's, I could envision a very nice Type-1 hypervisor out of this combination and could thrust Genode onto the hypervisor stage to compete with XEN, Hyper-V, and VMware in this arena.
Also currently it seems that Genode does not have a filemanager nor desktop manager as well and I have also been looking at possibly trying to port an existing open source linux or windows desktop manager over to Genode as that would also greatly increase the popularity as well when people can explore the OS a bit more as it evolves to a general OS.
I agree. There is even some work in progress on my side. However, instead of porting an existing DE, I am investigating some new ideas. If you like, you may have a look at my line of work on the following branch.
https://github.com/nfeske/genode/commits/ui
Apart from this undertaking, it would be worthwhile to look into the possibility of porting an existing desktop environment. As we have Qt5 readily available, there exists at least a starting point.
Cheers Norman