Roadmap 2019

[Norman Feske]

Hi John,

sorry that I left your previous posting unanswered. Thank you for
following the discussion so closely and for actively participating.

> Headless Sculpt is on my wish list for the year also.  In the interest
> of reducing duplicated work, could you tell us what Christian and
> Sebastian are working on more specifically?

In addition to using Sculpt on our laptops, we longed for a long-running
Genode system that carries real-world work loads with a designated
uptime of many weeks.

The basis is Sculpt with a custom NIC-router configuration and an
automatically deployed variant of the "noux-system" package. In contrast
to the regular noux-system package, which hosts a noux session in
graphical window, this variant makes the noux session remotely available
via SSH. Since the noux-system subsystem has the config fs, report fs,
and the Genode partition mounted, the whole system can be remotely
inspected and sculpted. E.g., new network services can be added by
modifying /config/deploy and config/nic_router on the fly.

As an example for real-world workload, we spawn one or more virtual
machines as Genode build servers. Each of those VMs is remotely
accessible via SSH also.

If you like, you can have a look at Christian's topic branch [1]. But
I'm afraid that it is not too useful without proper documentation, yet.

[1] https://github.com/chelmuth/genode/commits/18.11-plus-buildbot

> I was thinking along the lines of a VNC server.  (I was able to port the
> "libvncserver" library without any code changes, but since I'm still
> working on the application half, I don't know how well it works yet.)

That's great to know! The integration of VNC is not on our radar yet.
But I can see how nicely it would complement the scenario. If the VNC
server provides a framebuffer and input service, we could easily combine
it with a dedicated instance of nitpicker+wm - each of those hosted as
subsystems within Sculpt's runtime. Then arbitrary interactive
applications could be routed to this GUI stack and thereby become
remotely accessible. That would rock! :-)

Cheers
Norman

-- 
Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
Genode Labs

https://www.genode-labs.com · https://genode.org

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