Roadmap 2017

[Christian Helmuth]

Hello,

On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 01:04:50PM +0100, Norman Feske wrote:
> the end of the year is approaching. So it is the right time to make up
> our minds for the upcoming year.

Thanks Norman for keeping up the good tradition and igniting the
discussion of the steps for 2017 in the "reflective" Christmas time ;-)

> Review of the past year
> -----------------------

I personally did not manage to setup my x250 for day-to-day work on
Genode and that's a shame. But I had time to prepare a demonstration
of the current features for  talk I held in fall. During this time I
identified some shortcomings beside the fact that switching to Genode
is not just installation. However, the experience of using Genode and
seeing how capable the OS already is ensures me that we're on the
right track and that I myself have to _use_ the system to stay on that
track.

> Norman's goals for 2017
> -----------------------
> 
> With the ABI and dynamic init in place, I'd like to concentrate on
> stressing the framework, both in terms of using it much more intensively
> and by creating artificial stress. By the time of the release of version
> 17.05, Genode should - in principle - be well suited for the the
> maintenance of a long-term supported version.

I will definitely help in this regard as much as possible, on the one
hand for the reason I mentioned above and on the other hand to get
more users to make their own hands-on experiences with Genode (and
hopefully get infected). I'm convinced the rolling-update feature will
be the pivotal point in this plan.

> Now I am interested in your plans and goals for 2017! ;-)

My plan to work on Genode also includes to move reasonable workloads
out of my beloved Linux working environment into native components on
Genode. The major motivation is security resp. confidentiality of the
manifold shapes of sensitive data. Therefore, I pursue the plan to
implement my email workflow as a component-based Genode application.
The ingredients are components for protocols (IMAP/SMTP), handling
local mailboxes (currently I use mutt), editing mails (vim), and PGP
support (gnupg).

I already see some additional obstacles on the path to communicate via
email solely on Genode and my x250. First, the x250 has only a 13"
screen but a FullHD resolution, so I need support for resizeable
terminals with configurable/alternative font sizes. Also, I'm pretty
clumsy when it comes to use the mouse on the desktop, so I'd like to
keep my fingers on the keyboard as much as possible. Therefore, I'd
like to revive the idea of a tiled window manager for Genode with
support for virtual desktops. The icing on the cake (but not a real
plan) is to support multiple monitors beyond the current mirror mode.

In addition to this plan, I see two less ambitious but nevertheless
appealing improvements. First, I have been using SD cards as simple
in-the-background backup solution for years. So, I'd like to enhance
Genode's support for SD-card readers by PCI-SDHCI on x86 and a port of
the rdiff-backup tool. I also learned that our Qt5 port is getting
pretty dusty though represents our only available rich widget toolkit
on Genode. So, we should update our port to version 5.7 of the Qt
framework in 2017 and thereby benefit not only from the improvements
and fixes feature-wise but also from enhancements in the Qt Platform
Abstraction induced by Wayland etc.

Greets and Merry Christmas
-- 
Christian Helmuth
Genode Labs

https://www.genode-labs.com/ · https://genode.org/
https://twitter.com/GenodeLabs · /ˈdʒiː.nəʊd/

Genode Labs GmbH · Amtsgericht Dresden · HRB 28424 · Sitz Dresden
Geschäftsführer: Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske, Christian Helmuth