Hello Genodians,
looking back at 2019, I see quite a few achievements, some matching our planned goals laid out on the road map and some more motivated by needs of Genode users and customers of Genode Labs. I'd like to thank all guys from Genode Labs and external contributors alike for an eventful and prolific Genode year. A particular highlight for me was the first Genode Community Summer event, which despite my initial scepticism was an entire success and makes a well-balanced Genode year towards FOSDEM and Hack'n'Hike in the first half. I'm definitely in for a renewal in August/September.
In retrospect (and like the years before), my personal objectives for 2019 drafted in January experienced mixed attention. This said, I contributed my share to Genodians.org but not as much as I liked. This is strongly linked to the fact that my planned work on Genode network appliances had to make room for various other important tasks.
Nonetheless, I'd like to put the Genode-based router and NAS vault on the agenda again this year as this topic holds huge potential to showcase Genode's strengths. Beside the scenarios themselves, challenges of this topic are:
- Performance and robustness of the network stack including drivers, protocol implementation and the NIC router as well as the LibC and VFS integration - Secured network protocols (SSL, SSH, wireguard) depending on the application - Configuration interface
Beyond this Steckenpferd, I expect a load of other opportunities to lend a hand from low-level debugging over tool-chain peculiarities and Goa-based software porting right up to the development of entire complex scenarios as in the years before. Therefore, I hesitate to commit to one or more of the following topics that are becoming more important now as we are "using and consolidating".
- Complete LibC thread safety - Improved STL support (e.g., threading and mutexes) - Continuous POSIX-compliance testing - Decoupling Qt5 from Genode sources with Goa
Regards