Hello everyone,
and a happy new year!
To me personally it seems 2018 will be the year of "sculpt", and although I much appreciate my daily work on a Genode base, I fear other activities will become orphaned - which is our own kernel and support of embedded platforms.
Therefore, I'd like to take up the cudgles for putting some effort into the further development of the hw kernel. Currently, it cannot serve as a base for something like the sculpt scenario, because of missing features like SMP support and virtualization extensions. On the other hand, it is the only kernel target, we fully understand and are able to control in a manageable time, e.g., if problems arise like meltdown or spectre.
In the moment, it often feels like doing a hobby project if I practice maintainance work regarding the kernel. To me it seems its time to leap in the dark and fill the gap to put real workload on top of it. I know it contradicts with the overall goal to put energy into missing pieces, because the kernel development is not part of that. Anyway, if we do not want to quit the hw development, nor waste energy into a longstanding experiment, it's time to complete it. I would like to fill the gap, together with other (x86 virtualization) experienced developers, by:
* revert kernel optimization to share the address space with other * components at least on top of x86, keyword: meltdown * enable SMP for x86 * implement IOMMU support * add x86 hypervisor functionality to hw
Apart from the kernel work, I really like a fully functional (UTF8) terminal, ssh client, and a more convenient window-manager in the near future. Here, I like to take part too.
Regards Stefan