On 12/27/2017 11:15 AM, Christian Helmuth wrote:
Hello,
thanks Norman for making a start with the road-map discussion and also for the review of 2017. Personally, I'm quite excited that Sculpt enables me to work on Genode each day. This is pretty much different from what I felt one year ago with a rather static scenario that I used only once for a talk.
Looking at 2017 in hindsight, I did not invest much time into my personal plan, which was a Genode-native multi-component email workflow including IMAP, SMTP, local (maildir) storage, and mutt as MUA. Nevertheless, I'll extend the plan to 2018 as Sculpt promises less obstacles and features true dynamic Genode subsystems beside the traditional Linux VM. The first natural step is the use of multiple VMs tailored for dedicated purposes of daily work (speak development, email, web browsing). This is not my personal ambition but the first pieces were already put in place by others in the team. This scenario helps to understand and solve the task of sharing data when splitting the daily work into more fine-grained domains. Next, the email VM can be replaced by the Genode email subsystem developed in parallel.
Chris, please keep us informed about your progress on the IMAP server scenario if you can. I am also gradually making my systems more modular using VMs (although not quite as granular as what you describe above), and I am currently running an little IMAP server in a *nix VM, which I would love to replace with a Genode "appliance" VM.
Everyone, since I'm already chiming in, I might as well throw in this idea as food for thought:
It might be possible to piggyback on the work of the "postmarketOS" project ( https://postmarketos.org/ ) to get Genode running on a variety of smartphones with only one porting effort. In a nutshell, they are isolating all the device-specific code into one file, in order to allow creating a single (highly customizable, Alpine Linux-based) OS image to run on all the supported devices. I wonder if it's possible to create a Genode-on-Linux (ARM) scenario on this foundation.
In any case, thanks for the amazing work, and Happy New Year to everyone!