Roadmap 2018

[Stefan Kalkowski]

Hello everyone,

and a happy new year!

To me personally it seems 2018 will be the year of "sculpt", and
although I much appreciate my daily work on a Genode base, I fear
other activities will become orphaned - which is our own kernel and
support of embedded platforms.

Therefore, I'd like to take up the cudgles for putting some effort
into the further development of the hw kernel. Currently, it cannot
serve as a base for something like the sculpt scenario, because of
missing features like SMP support and virtualization extensions. On
the other hand, it is the only kernel target, we fully understand and
are able to control in a manageable time, e.g., if problems arise like
meltdown or spectre.

In the moment, it often feels like doing a hobby project if I practice
maintainance work regarding the kernel. To me it seems its time to
leap in the dark and fill the gap to put real workload on top of it. I
know it contradicts with the overall goal to put energy into missing
pieces, because the kernel development is not part of that. Anyway, if
we do not want to quit the hw development, nor waste energy into a
longstanding experiment, it's time to complete it.
I would like to fill the gap, together with other (x86 virtualization)
experienced developers, by:

* revert kernel optimization to share the address space with other
* components at least on top of x86, keyword: meltdown
* enable SMP for x86
* implement IOMMU support
* add x86 hypervisor functionality to hw

Apart from the kernel work, I really like a fully functional (UTF8) terminal,
ssh client, and a more convenient window-manager in the near future.
Here, I like to take part too.

Regards
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Kalkowski
Genode labs

https://github.com.skalk | https://genode.org