A happy and healthy new year to all of you fellow genodians!
Here are my thoughts regarding the past year and upcoming roadmap:
What's your reflection of Genode's past year?
I share the enthusiasm Norman described regarding our joint efforts to facilitate the porting of existing device drivers especially Linux device drivers to Genode. A sometimes painful but nonetheless motivating work. Also I did not expected that so much drivers will be ported using the new approach in such a short period of time.
Nevertheless, this line of work prevented me to achieve the unification of the platform driver API across different architectures in time. Although it is almost accomplished, the original goal was to finish it in 21.05. Inwardly, I dreamed of having a working Wifi card in Sculpt on the MNT Reform 2 at this time, which is not the case.
Anyway, when looking at the great steps regarding GPU support and the heavy workloads, e.g., the Falkon webbrowser is capable to manage on top of Genode, that is great!
Deeply impressed I am about the contributions from our community just out of enthusiasm, like the extended VirtIO support from Piotr Tworek, or the tireless Tomasz Gajewski working on all kinds of Raspberry Pi support.
What are the topics you deem as most interesting to work on?
Well obviously I want to finish the unification and re-newal of the platform driver and PCI landscape. Deprecate all older drivers during this year, and move them to their corresponding SoC/Board repositories. I would like to enable WiFi and NVMe on the MNT Reform2 and like to consolidate the current driver landscape to minimize performance overhead e.g. with respect to timer service usage when running a significant number of drivers concurrently.
Currently, I cannot use the MNT Reform2 with Sculpt OS as daily driver, because for various use-cases I still need a Linux VM. Therefore, I would like to extend the ARM VMM to provide VirtIO GPU/Framebuffer and Input devices.
Do you already have tangible plans you can share with us?
Are there road blocks that stand in the way of your plans?
I would not call them road blocks, but while analyzing the requirements of a re-newed platform driver implementation, I was wondering whether we still need to support ancient kernels like Pistachio, or the old Fiasco. Apart from the dependencies on quite old hardware of these kernels, a lot of workloads are not possible to run on them. We have to ignore the nightly kernel faults etc. of especially Pistachio. Therefore, I would suggest to retire these kernels within 2022.
What is your vision of using Genode at the end of 2022?
Receiving a second-factor authentication code via SMS on the Genode/Pinephone while loging-in to some web service using Sculpt on my MNT Reform2 that would be nice ;-).
Best regards Stefan