Hello everyone,
I've recently asked my Operating Systems professor about an interesting project to contribute to, and he recommended Genode.
After a glimpse of the docs and playing a little bit with the tutorial repo, it really got my interest. It would be great if any of you would like to guide me a little bit about how I could be useful to the project. Maybe there are good issues for a new contributor or any feature testing to be done, anything that you consider relevant.
About me, I have a little bit of experience with kernel development as I've worked on a hobby kernel project.
Regards, Mihail
PS. I've seen this strange output message after running hello_tutorial: "17592186044415 MiB RAM and 8997 caps assigned to init" and it feels pretty wrong, maybe it's a bug.
Hi Mihail,
Welcome to the list! It's cool to read that your professor recommended you to do a Genode project :) I think, the best starting point is the list "Genode Future Challenges":
https://genode.org/about/challenges
It is an up-to-date description of not yet implemented ideas that would be benificial for the Genode project. Furthermore, don't hesitate to post questions regarding these topics or Genode in general on this mailing list - we'll try to answer them as soon as possible.
I don't know whether you are already aware of the "Genode Foundations" book:
https://genode.org/documentation/genode-foundations/index
It's a must-read if you're interested in diving deeper into the basic concepts and mechanisms behind Genode. However, regarding higher levels of the stack, there are many component/library specific 'README' files in the source repo:
https://github.com/genodelabs/genode
In the same repo, in '/doc' you can find all Genode release notes. They serve as a very good in-detail description of topics (using 'grep'). Last but not least, some topics are best described at the public Genodians blog space:
I hope this helps. Let me know whether you found something that catches your eye!
Best regards, Martin
El 14.10.20 a las 10:59, Mihail Feraru escribió:
Hi Martin,
I am the professor that recommended Genode. (Quite surprised that my student contacted you so fast and straightforward!)
Just a quick note, but maybe we can take this in private if you want, the lab work at my course involves a 5-6 weeks period where I ask my students to form small teams to tackle a large project in an open-source OS. I would love to add to my list small tasks for them to work on Genode. Of course they don't have to go into your tree :)
For kernel work I am currently suggesting they do their project on OpenBSD (just suggesting, they are free to choose) because it has not that many abstraction layers (unlike Linux) and because I am a kernel developer there since 2008 so I can help them quickly. But I would love for them to hack on Genode or Sculpt instead. From what I read so far, the code is clean and straight-forward. Of course my experience is limited here, so your word might shed some light in this regard which is why I am writing here.
Thank you for Genode and everything else!
Paul Irofti
On 2020-10-14 12:32, Martin Stein wrote:
Hi Paul,
Welcome to the list and thanks for your kind words and your interest towards Genode :) From my side we can keep it public, if you don't mind, of course.
I wanted to add to my last mail for you and Mihail that our Roadmap can serve as hint in which direction we're planning to push Genode in particular, and what are therefore fields where contributing could complement our work:
https://genode.org/about/road-map
Furthermore, this year, there's one topic on the Roadmap - the FUSE/lwext4 project - that would be especially fitting for contributional work. So far, there is none of us working at it but there has been already some community effort into this direction:
https://github.com/genodelabs/genode-world/issues/193
Another idea that came up is the enhancement of the desktop tooling landscape of Genode. An appealing approach for that is indeed the development in Sculpt OS itself. This way, students could deploy software developed inside a virtual machine on-the-fly in the host system for testing it.
Regarding the time contingent, I hope you undestand that it is hard for us to estimate the duration of particular projects as it depends heavily on the experience of the developer and the approach taken. But, of course, most projects can be split up into smaller steps making the planning more flexible.
It goes without saying that each of your students that is aiming for Genode is cordially invited to seek our help through this list!
Regarding complexity and abstraction, I can only share my experience as Genode developer with you. I like especially the level of code quality in Genode that stems, IMO, from the coding style (e.g., avoid macros wherever possible), tooling (e.g., by default GCC's effective C++, GCC warnings are errors), promoted programming patterns (e.g., asynchronous programming, avoid multithreading if not really necessary, principle of least privilege), error-reducing frameworks (e.g., for type-safe sub-byte access or a very guiding framework for block-data exchange), a strict git-versioning workflow, and a broad nightly testing.
I hope this helps!?
Best regards, Martin
El 14.10.20 a las 11:40, Paul Irofti escribió:
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Martin Stein -
Mihail Feraru -
Paul Irofti