Genode in distributed scenarios and ROM proxy implementation

[Johannes Schlatow]

Hi,

as I'm beginning to use Genode in a distributed scenario, I had some thoughts about the use of proxy components in order to transmit particular session interfaces over an arbitrary communication medium. The general concept here is that a client component can connect to a server component running on a different Genode system by using a proxy component on each side.

For starters, I implemented this for the ROM session. I call this implementation "remote ROM": The remote ROM server is instantiated on the server side and connects to a local ROM service. It relays the content of a particular ROM module the remote ROM client, which is instantiated on another Genode system. The remote ROM client receives the updated ROM content from the remote ROM server and provides a local ROM service.

In order to generalise the implementation, I separated the network-specific part in a backend library so that the backend can be tailored for the particular communication medium, protocol and policy. I think this renders the implementation highly flexible. I added a backend implementation (nic_ip) as a proof of concept, which uses a Nic service to transmit network packets with a static IPv4 header.

In my opinion, the remote ROM implementation is already the enabler for quite a lot of distributed scenarios as it allows full publisher-subscriber communication of arbitrary data without adding too much interdependencies between the systems.

The implementation can be found here:
https://github.com/ValiValpas/genode-world/tree/remoterom

*Please feel free to adapt/contribute/improve this concept and its implementation.*