Hello,
as the end of the year is approaching, it's time to make up our minds about the focus of the project in 2012.
There are numerous directions we may head to, for example, we could advance our ARM support to move towards the mobile space (tablets and smart phones), or put emphasis on multi-processor support and NUMA, new kernel platforms could be explored, or we could bring forward our ambitions to combine Genode with reconfigurable hardware.
However, for me personally, the biggest leap would be to start using Genode as everyday platform for my personal computing needs. I am convinced that the framework has reached the maturity and the essential functionality to make this vision come true in 2012. Using our platform for productive work would provide us with the incentive to address real-world problems that matter for actual users - simply because we would be demanding users. Furthermore, there is no better way to show the conviction that we have in our technology than to use it ourself.
Therefore, I propose "Eating our own dog food" as the grand theme of our project for the next year.
To schedule our road map, we should first become aware of our actual computing needs and then sensibly prioritize those requirements. I'll start with a brief list of software functionalities that I need.
Fundamental:
* VIM * Shell (e.g., bash) * Tool chain (coreutils, gcc, binutils, make, findutils, tar, Tcl, expect) * Persistent file system * Block-device encryption * SSH client * Git client * GNUPG * Web browser (also used for email, don't need multi-media stuff) * PDF viewer * A way to run a just-compiled Genode sub system * Interactive python shell (to be used as a calculator) * Screen lock * A fall-back virtual machine running Linux for carrying out sporadic work with images (Gimp, Povray, ImageMagick, etc.) and LaTeX, and for testing the Linux version of Genode
Of course, there are further things I desire that are not fundamentally important but would make the experience much more enjoyable.
Add-ons:
* Tiled window manager (similar to the wonderful ion3) * Intel wireless driver * Media player (at least for playing music) * Thinkpad ACPI support, fan daemon * Qemu * Tuxpaint
This list is surprisingly short. With Noux already having reached the state where we can execute VIM natively, supporting the other command-line tools will, for the most part, be a matter of enhancing Noux (i.e., adding support for the fork syscall).
In addition, I have the immediate goal to release a new live CD by February 2012. Ideally, the demo scenarios featured on the new live CD should give a glimpse on how Genode will be used a general- purpose OS.
Do you agree with the proposal of the overall theme for 2012? Which preconditions would you consider as fundamental to make Genode usable for carrying out productive work? Which other direction would you like to see Genode heading to?
Cheers Norman