Hi Michael,
thanks a lot for responding. It's always great to see what you - who are using Genode in the most creative ways - are up to.
Generic EHCI driver. This was the last thing I did start on. I somehow lost motivation,, I started with initing EHCI and could see that I got interrupts. [...] EHCI. I can't get my stupid head around DDE drivers, and I really want a generic EHCI driver as it enables a lot. XHCI is also possible.
DDE-Linux is fantastic for our team to support a wide range of hardware on par with Linux. But from an enthusiast point of view, it can be rather daunting. If I was in your shoes, I'd would probably also prefer to skip those layers of complexity and go directly to the hardware. It is more fun and rewarding. There is certainly room for HCD drivers beyond a DDE-Linux-based driver. Stefan has tempting ideas for splitting the host-controller driver(s) from the USB driver into separate (client) components, making them pluggable. Once these ideas come to fruition, the integration of custom host-controller drivers will become a natural option.
I want to realise my big plan from 2023. A very difficult project but is also quite rewarding. In my demo scenario in 2024 I picked i.MX8 because it was a SoC that both RISC OS and Genode supported ( I did a very quick and dirty bringup of RISC OS for MNT Reform some year/s ago). For the grand project I would like to find a way to do abstraction against Genode. Streamlining RISC OS HAL to Genode. Not easy but also not impossible. I think that the platform will be RK3588 as this is a very powerfull Soc and also to be available with MNT Reform. This also presents some new things for Genode.. The SoC has cores numbered 0 to 3 for the boot cpu .. but if you want to use the big cpu as your main one the current base-hw will not work. I would be happy to rethink how this should be done in Genode.
Thanks for sharing those plans.
BTW, just a few days ago, MNT started a new crowdfunding campaign for the Reform Next laptop [1], which will happen to use the RK3588 SoC by default.
[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/mnt-reform-next
All the best
Norman