Roadmap 2016

[Jookia]

On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 09:28:00AM +0100, Norman Feske wrote:
> Please don't get me wrong. I am not dismissing hardware support as a
> working topic. We will need to continuously work on that. But when doing
> so, I'd like to address current-generation or next-generation hardware.

Lurker here,

I think the best goal we can have right now is supporting hardware that work
with fully free software since relying on vendors to implement Genode-specific
quirks is going to be a losing battle. Perhaps it'd be better to focus instead
of generations, but by how hackable and long-term supported a project is.

Old Thinkpads can generally be maintained through replacing parts and using free
BIOS. It also means if you say, install Libreboot (or Autoboot, or even Coreboot
if you're that hardware) you can get debug support for your processor that might
not support AMT.

ARM is where I'm hanging around at the moment given there's boards out there
with schematics based on long-term chipsets used by the automotive industry. For
instance, I'm typing this from an i.MX6 chipset on a Novena board. A lot of the
microkernels already have support for this chipset, I'd just need to get the
Novena tools running on it. Thanks to etnaviv it has free graphics drivers.

On the opposite end we have low-end boards that people use for toying with.
Beaglebones, Banana Pis, the USB Armory. These would be incredibly useful to
point people to if they want to toy with Genode without setting up an expensive
machine. These all run U-Boot which could be used to provide serial support.

> Cheers
> Norman

Cheers,
Jookia.