Sculpt questions, briefly answered

[Norman Feske]

Hello everyone,

it's really great to see your interest in Sculpt! Hereby, I'd like to
clarify a few things about Sculpt that were raised in the discussion.


Question: Is any kernel supported other than NOVA?

  No. Please stick to NOVA because it is the only kernel used with
  Sculpt at Genode Labs. (this may change throughout the year)


Question: How about using disk partitions?

  We deliberately left this topic out of the scope of Sculpt EA because
  it is not essential for a minimum-viable general-purpose setup. It
  goes without saying that Sculpt will support partitions down the road.
  You can use part_blk manually but it is not the official Sculpt path
  today.


Question: Improving the detection of the default block device?

  The current heuristics is overly simplistic and of course not here
  to stay. Our current idea is to let the drivers subsystem scan the
  available block devices for one that hosts a partition with a magic
  label like "GENODE".


Question: Do we plan to introduce any boot-time options?

  No. Genode's core has no boot-time arguments. User-provided
  configuration enters the picture at the level of the init component.


Question: How to debug driver-related issues?

  If Sculpt does not run out of the box, please start experimenting
  with running simpler scenarios on your hardware first. E.g., Sculpt's
  drivers subsystem can be executed without the rest of Sculpt using
  the gems/run/driver_manager.run script, which - in contrast to
  Sculpt - outputs driver messages to core's LOG service that prints
  the message to the serial line.


Question: What is the scope of features of the drivers subsystem?

  Since the drivers subsystem is not managed or configured by the user,
  it must stay as simple and generic as possible. Everything that can
  in principle be realized as part of the runtime subsystem should be
  part of the runtime, not the drivers subsystem. E.g., part_blk does
  not belong into the drivers subsystem.


Question: What is the vision behind the Leitzentrale?

  Eventually, all actions that we perform manually via Noux as of
  today will become available via a graphical user interface.
  Under the hood, this user interface will "emulate" the user's
  manual interaction with the report and config file systems.
  Once all (common) boot-time operations are covered by the
  graphical user interface, Noux will be removed from the boot
  image.


Question: How will the end result of Sculpt look like?

  We don't know. Sculpt EA is just a stepping stone that we use to
  explore the design space.


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