Hi Michael,
thank you for the elaborate contribution to the road-map discussion.
I'm very happy about your reflections, particularly about learning that the idea of supplementing your custom remote shell to Sculpt - which we sketched out together at the Hack'n'Hike - worked out so well.
Your continued success and enthusiasm while using Genode in your domain of research (NUMA, data center, many CPUs) actually surprises me quite a bit because these use cases weren't considered at the design time of the system. Your independent validation of our architectural choices is reassuring.
It is great to read that you consider upstreaming some gold nuggets of your work, like using your allocator in the libc. That would address a long-standing limitation and has thereby the potential to eliminate cproc's need to maintain a jemalloc version of the libc for the sole use of Chromium. Also with our ambition of running Genode's SDK on Genode, the performance of the libc allocator becomes increasingly important. So the timing for such an improvement couldn't be any better.
Above all, I am more than ever convinced that Genode’s architecture combined with the concept of microkernels provides a better foundation for today’s cloud infrastructure than Linux or Windows can provide
On the one hand, I find this sentiment flattering, on technical grounds. On the other hand, I feel completely lost about how we (Genode, Genode Labs, our community) may enter such realms. Infrastructure providers are usually huge organizations, presumably with their in-house developed/customized hypervisor stacks. I trust your technical judgement. But lacking personal relations with cloud infrastructure providers, this world remains distant and intangible to me. I wonder, do you see any actionable steps that would lead us towards this alien world?
In contrast, what you write about building bridges by the porting of typical server applications sounds very tangible. So you are coming aboard the Goa train? That would be very cool!
Thanks again for sharing many topics worth looking forward to in 2026.
See you at FOSDEM!
Cheers Norman