Hi John,
- What are your ambitions for 2018?
I have goals in three basic categories:
- Desktop. This has two parts. The easy one is to switch to Genode as
my VirtualBox host. But I also would like to have the VirtualBox Guest Additions for using Genode within a VM.
Would this qualify for the roadmap?
the topic fits well with the overall theme that is emerging. I would probably speak more generally about fostering the integration of Genode with existing protocols and infrastructure. E.g., Emery's recent work with 9p [1] would also fall in this category. Also, the use of Xpra would be fitting [2].
[1] https://github.com/ehmry/ninep [2] https://github.com/zorodc/genode-world/commits/xpra
That said, I would not go as far as making definite promises.
Speaking of the Guest Additions for Genode, I can imagine a nice picture where Sculpt could offer a VBox shared folder as storage option in addition to the detected AHCI/NVMe devices and the RAM fs. This way, the user could host the Sculpt storage in a plain directory on a non-Genode host system and deploy Sculpt within VirtualBox by accessing those files. The integration would be quite seamless.
If not, I am starting to work on it - it should make a great learning experience (and hopefully a useful blog series), because the various facets touch so many different parts of the system. But I will be slow, so if others are interested, I will be happy to learn from them instead! ;^)
Cool!
- Tablet. This is part of a longer-term goal, but I would love to have
Genode running in some form on an open-hardware tablet if possible. (I don't even care if it's useful at this stage.)
I know there are efforts toward building mobile front-ends under Qt, but I would be even more interested in working toward a native UI front-end. I really feel that Genode would be a great fit for tablets.
I know tablet-related work will not make the roadmap for 2019, but would it be possible to agree on a semi-official tablet hardware target for the next year or two, for those of us who are interested in pursuing this?
From my point of view, the most sensible choice would be a device based
on the NXP i.MX SoC. This SoC is used by the Librem phone [3]. So there may be potential of synergies. More importantly, i.MX comes with proper official documentation and Genode already has a number of drivers for several i.MX peripherals.
[3] https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
Cheers Norman