Hello everyone,
I wish you a pleasant and exciting 2025!
Reflecting on 2024 evokes mixed feelings:
Genode 24.05 incorporated support for Intel's Virtual-Machine Extensions (VMX) and as envisioned in the road map we managed to release a first Sculpt PC variant on the base-hw kernel. However, we didn't get base-hw to the point of widespread use in Sculpt on PCs.
On the Rust side of things, it was very gratifying to see the ease with which our friends Robin and Daniel managed to get Devilution transpiled to Rust to work on Genode on the Pinephone with just tiny changes to our Rust support in Goa at our annual Hack'n'Hike event. I managed to find a new approach to making Rust play nice with Genode in the face of binary incompatibility[1] and made progress at implementing async IO support in our libc port, but fell short of getting async Rust runtimes to work as a foundation for a potential Rust component in the envisioned multi-component show case.
Ultimately, I'm happy to see Sculpt OS 24.10 run smoothly on my development machine with the countless improvements across the system and the new multi-monitor support and improved resource accounting supporting my high-resolution setup out of the box. As a developer, Genode's enhanced debugging capabilities and the Goa SDK with its remote target support were another source of joy.
For 2025, my plan is to soon wrap up ongoing refactoring work in base-hw and get base-hw ready to run on a larger range of machines.
Over the year I would like to make some more improvements to base-hw's virtualization support and I hope to find time to get our Rust port ready for common async frameworks. Besides that, I am open to see where the varying interests of our customers take us, may it be enhancing base-hw, building more complex software scenarios on Genode OS or something else entirely.
Kind regards,
Ben
[1] https://genodians.org/atopia/2024-08-27-building-rust-with-a-custom-profile