Roadmap 2018

[Alexander Boettcher]

Hello all,

attached my ideas and plans.

Review 2017
-----------

In January of 2017 I was not able to boot Genode on
my brand-new notebook side by side with other OSes installed in UEFI
mode. To overcome the issue, I choose to change this as side project and
managed to get the Genode framework, Genode's hw kernel, the seL4 kernel
and the NOVA kernel ready for UEFI. Also thanks to the external
contribution of Johannes Kliemann, we have graphical support in UEFI
mode even beside Intel graphic cards.

seL4 was also a weak UEFI target, just to trigger _some_ community
interaction. Fortunately, the experiment went well and the seL4 kernel
changes got accepted after some re-work rounds. Notable, that the seL4
kernel developers are open for external contributions. Unfortunately,
this is not given for all mircokernel projects we had to deal with.

The other bigger working field was to finish the Virtualbox 5 port for
Genode/NOVA, paused in 2016. According to the signals from
our customers and also from our "Sculpt" cook, the move from VirtualBox
4 to 5 was relatively smooth.

With the raising "Sculpt" at end of 2017, several items triggered to be
solved, e.g. for me in the NOVA kernel and the platform driver.

2018
----
2018 will continue as 2017 ended - by work triggered by "Sculpt".
I imagine topics like _working_ restarted driver (not all do) or ordered
shutdown/restart of the system.

For my personal "Sculpt" setup I started and tend to continue to split
up, as far as maintainable, my working environment in several (minimal)
VMs (e.g browser, eMail, compiler, tftp VM and more). I hope to replace
some of the VMs over the year by native Genode components as soon as the
alternatives become available and/or performance become acceptable.
Where possible, I also tend to use the Seoul VMM.

The other area I would like to tackle, is to move some of Genode/NOVA
only features to other Genode/kernel combinations, e.g. virtualization
leveraging our 3 x86 VMMs and IOMMU support. The harmonization of the
Genode interface to the kernel interfaces will cause some headaches,
especially when not just functionality&security but also performance
matters.

As pointed out by Stefan, Genode's hw kernel will have to get some
feature extensions - here I tend to participate.

Finally, I would like to see/to address some (fmpov to low prioritized)
work in Genode's core. Beside some modernization - read only dataspace
capabilities and removing physical address information from the
Dataspace interface come to my mind.

Happy hacking,

-- 
Alexander Boettcher
Genode Labs

http://www.genode-labs.com - http://www.genode.org

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


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