Hello all,
attached my ideas and plans.
Review 2017 -----------
In January of 2017 I was not able to boot Genode on my brand-new notebook side by side with other OSes installed in UEFI mode. To overcome the issue, I choose to change this as side project and managed to get the Genode framework, Genode's hw kernel, the seL4 kernel and the NOVA kernel ready for UEFI. Also thanks to the external contribution of Johannes Kliemann, we have graphical support in UEFI mode even beside Intel graphic cards.
seL4 was also a weak UEFI target, just to trigger _some_ community interaction. Fortunately, the experiment went well and the seL4 kernel changes got accepted after some re-work rounds. Notable, that the seL4 kernel developers are open for external contributions. Unfortunately, this is not given for all mircokernel projects we had to deal with.
The other bigger working field was to finish the Virtualbox 5 port for Genode/NOVA, paused in 2016. According to the signals from our customers and also from our "Sculpt" cook, the move from VirtualBox 4 to 5 was relatively smooth.
With the raising "Sculpt" at end of 2017, several items triggered to be solved, e.g. for me in the NOVA kernel and the platform driver.
2018 ---- 2018 will continue as 2017 ended - by work triggered by "Sculpt". I imagine topics like _working_ restarted driver (not all do) or ordered shutdown/restart of the system.
For my personal "Sculpt" setup I started and tend to continue to split up, as far as maintainable, my working environment in several (minimal) VMs (e.g browser, eMail, compiler, tftp VM and more). I hope to replace some of the VMs over the year by native Genode components as soon as the alternatives become available and/or performance become acceptable. Where possible, I also tend to use the Seoul VMM.
The other area I would like to tackle, is to move some of Genode/NOVA only features to other Genode/kernel combinations, e.g. virtualization leveraging our 3 x86 VMMs and IOMMU support. The harmonization of the Genode interface to the kernel interfaces will cause some headaches, especially when not just functionality&security but also performance matters.
As pointed out by Stefan, Genode's hw kernel will have to get some feature extensions - here I tend to participate.
Finally, I would like to see/to address some (fmpov to low prioritized) work in Genode's core. Beside some modernization - read only dataspace capabilities and removing physical address information from the Dataspace interface come to my mind.
Happy hacking,