Hi Alex,
thank you for sharing your perspective and interests.
Your engagement with the nitty-gritty details of PC platforms - like power management, Intel Gen12, and suspend/resume - is a crucial counterweight to the PinePhone theme. From your posting, I sense that these interests are intrinsic, which I find very fortunate.
What directions are you most excited about?
Privately, most exciting was that the Seoul VMM is now enjoyable on a day-to-day basis, because of the way better integration with Sculpt thanks to the new Virtio model support for gpu, input and audio. With that I have an enjoyable and maintainable and easy and quick upgradable path for up-to-date Firefox and Thunderbird VMs on Sculpt. Beside that, I worked on several proof of concept topics to improve further life on Sculpt, e.g. dynamic CPU power & frequency adjustments and monitoring for Intel HWP (work notebook) and AMD p-states (home desktop), with which one can steer indirectly the fan noise. The other life improvement was the principle support of the Intel Display Driver (as proof of concept) to support beside the mirror mode also the extended mode, to have one large screen across several attached monitors.
Which topics do you deem as interesting to explore yourself? Do you already happen to have rough plans about 2023?
- Continuing support for ACPI suspend & resume to Genode' base-hw (x86_64)
- Device & driver restart and/or resume support after ACPI wakeup ->
precondition for advanced/useful scenarios like Sculpt OS (x86)
- native Qemu port for cross architecture development
- Further Seoul VMM cultivation
- AMD display and GPU support
- make some proof of concept work ready for Genode upstream
This plan paints a very consistent picture, most of which I will happily reflect on the road map. Your Qemu ambition is a nice surprise. Count me in as a user. :)
Regarding the AMD display/GPU support, I'm hesitant when it comes to the official road map, for two reasons:
First, given that the Intel GPU support was a multi-year effort, I'm very much afraid of the potential fragmentation that would come by opening up a second line of development. I wonder, is this realistic at all without the focus granted by a well-funded project?
Second, I'm concerned about raising unrealistic public expectations. If we mention AMD on our official road map, observers may draw the wrong conclusion regarding the maturity of Genode on such hardware. Given the amount of quality assurance we spend on Intel (including the daily use of Sculpt on our laptops), I cannot see us achieving the same quality for AMD. In the worst case, it could become an expensive hobby that leaves people disappointed nevertheless.
So whereas I am fully supportive of further cultivating the use of Genode on AMD driven by curiosity, I personally want avoid an uncomfortable sense of responsibility about it. How do you think we should go about it?
Cheers Norman