Roadmap 2015

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Hello everyone,

I don't have suggestions for devs, but I would like to share my goals for
2015 and solicit some suggestions on how to prioritize my own work.

This summer I started converting the Make build system to a Nix build
system, which seemed dubious at times to even me, but I have reached a
point where I think things will get exciting.

I would like to emphasize that this isn't a criticism of the current
system, I just find the properties of Nix very interesting and this is an
effort to fold the Genode into the way I have been composing my legacy OS.
I have not been modifying any Genode code, and I have no intentions of
writing new components without Make rules.

I have a few directions that I could and would like to go with this, and
I'd like to know which path of investigation sounds most interesting to
any of you.

* Formally benchmark Nix performance against Make.

* Generate binary packages using existing Nix continuous integration tools
   and Make rules for fetching them.

* Adapt the Nix packages collection to build its existing packages for
   Noux. This similar to how packages may be built for Darwin or BSD,
  I would abort converting Make rules for anything not required for
   bootstrapping a Noux toolchain.

* Work towards running virtualizing instances of NixOS, building the Genode
   host and the NixOS guest concurrently.


I have had success related to virtualizing, I have managed to integrate my
build expressions with the NixOS system expression on my host machine,
installing a NOVA scenario to my boot partition and GRUB menu. One could
obviously do this with a set of scripts calling make, but in this way the
Genode components are treated as system dependencies just as my linux host
would treat its system services.

I think the next logical step in this line of thought would be to build my
Linux host system as an image optimized for Seoul, but I am traveling at
the moment and virtualizing Seoul scenarios has been slow going with only a
single laptop.

Emery

(I apologize if this email does not thread properly.)[1]