TTS and Genode

[John J. Karcher]

As a relatively inexperienced hobbyist in Genode, I can't give you much 
advice about porting the build system, but as an alternative OS 
enthusiast (including Haiku), I will give you a few thoughts in general 
(below).

(For those who don't know, TuneTracker is the premier showcase 
application built for Haiku, taking advantage of the latter's multimedia 
responsiveness.)


On 12/11/18 6:45 AM, ttcoder at netcourrier.com wrote:
> Howdy all,
>
> We are a (very small) company looking for a good home for our software suite. The Be-derived OS we've been using served us well for a long
> time, but instability has become a problem of late, with kernel/drivers crashes -- obviously that is where a micro-kernel/framework would
> shine. My thinking goes, if we are to 'port' our SW we might as well go for state of the art. That way, it will be the first and last time we do that
> transition. Our clients don't need (nor event want!) all the bells and whistles of a commodity OS; they just need a solid kernel with our apps
> running full-screen. So it appears to be a perfect match with Genode/nova, nitpicker et alia, keeping in mind I of course have some huge work
> ahead of me.

I have come to the exact same conclusion myself.  Genode's design is 
very elegant (IMHO), the team is highly professional, and although it is 
still evolving, the platform is pretty mature at this point.  All in 
all, I think it is the best bet going forward for an open-source, 
trustworthy computing base.

> Anyway long story short: although I'm very enthusiastic about Genode, I first need to get my greedy hands on it and compile it. I've been
> failing at that repeatedly ever since doing my first git clone, ca. 18.05
>
> A collaborative worksheet might be better suited for copy-pasting error messages and for organizing thoughts (rather than cluttering this
> mailing-list): I've created this etherpad as a companion venue for working on this, in case there is interest:
>
> 	https://etherpad.net/p/KcMuF3Ylbu_gcc
>
> I'll update it with my progress. Very eager to get the ball rolling and start working with Genode. If all else fails I guess I'll
> download/install/learn to use Linux. But since all my software is haiku native, I'd have to constantly reboot from one OS to the other, hurting
> productivity. It's probably worthwhile for me to invest time in building Genode and run 'scenarios' (qemu) directly from within Haiku.

Others may be able to help you with the build system, but it might be 
easier to set up a multi-OS environment using virtualization.

In my case, I migrated to VirtualBox a few years ago.  I specifically 
don't run any end-user software on the host - everything is in VMs.  
This allowed me to quickly migrate the host from Windows to *nix (and 
soon to Genode!), while taking my time migrating the end-user 
functionality between OSes.

For Genode development, the official recommendation is Ubuntu LTS, but I 
use a Debian Unstable VM, which has worked flawlessly.  Haiku runs fine 
in VirtualBox in my experience (I'm listening to streaming audio on it 
right now).  You might even take advantage of the option of using your 
real HD partitions instead of virtual disks, which might reduce the 
number of times you need to reboot.

This may not suffice when you're testing low-latency audio (etc.), but 
for bread-and-butter development, it might get the job done.

In any case, please keep us informed of your progress!