Roadmap 2019

[Christian Helmuth]

Hello,

thanks Norman for launching this enjoyable discussion (and keeping up
the tradition). Reading the postings helped much to get in proper
reflective mood to wrap up the past months and organize my ideas for
2019.

On Sun, Dec 23, 2018 at 08:46:48PM +0100, Norman Feske wrote:
> The Year of Sculpt

Looking back at the past year I'm very proud of our achievements. Not
only that our team at Genode Labs conducts its work on Sculpt every
day, the OS is also mature enough to be useful for enthusiasts. Also,
each step on the Sculpt timeline widened the horizon of what could be
achieved with this approach in the future.

As the previous posters, I organize my ideas for 2019 into the
suggested categories, because I'm confident they make up a perfect
frame for our planning.

> 1) Widening the audience of Sculpt OS

In this category I see two important aspects, which were mentioned in
the discussion already.

Documentation

  We should keep up the series of articles about Sculpt that we
  founded in 2018 and not only update the development progress but
  also document the Sculpt OS as a whole (starting from our talk
  slides). Ideally, the Sculpt documentation will evolve into an
  up-to-date book about this specific Genode OS accompanying the
  Foundations.

Applications

  As we can't implement all required applications natively using the
  Genode API by ourselves, the porting effort of existing applications
  must be reduced. The first take of the Genode SDK was released in
  November and we should intensify our efforts in this regard. I see
  the SDK primarily as environment for POSIX applications that
  integrate seamlessly into the system by means of the libc and the
  VFS. Additional SDK modules could be added on top of the base SDK,
  for example, a Genode Qt SDK, which integrates with the Qt
  Creator/qmake/cmake easily.

  Christian Prochaska also mentioned a tool-chain update with
  additional effort for better autotool support. Maybe we should merge
  the tool chain into the SDK? Also, we may consider musl as
  (Linux-compatible) C runtime for relevant platforms, namely
  x86-32/64, ARMv7/8, and RISC-V. The Linux compatibility of the libc
  may help to enable more applications which lack universal UNIX
  support or suffer from poor FreeBSD adaptation.

  Further, I'd like to support the proposition that the enablement of
  more language runtimes attracts a broader diversity of developers.

> 2) Fostering the community spirit around our project

I'll definitely have my part on genodians.org. Therefore, I plan to
document progress on the network-appliance projects mentioned below
and other stuff about Genode. Furthermore, I wonder if Genode could
become more visible on open source gatherings beyond FOSDEM or even
conferences/exhibitions and are all ears for suggestions how to
achieve this.

> 3) Marketing of Genode-based products

Even if "products" is a rather heavy term, I plan to push Genode-based
deployments to address tasks in our networking environment at Genode
Labs. I see the Sculpt runtime as a key to easily develop appliances
for a broad range of applications like Sebastian's build server,
secured NAS, IPv4 router/firewall, or even John Karcher's always-on
mail/file/audio-streaming server. This goal involves many improvements
and adaptions of components (e.g., NIC router) and Sculpt (e.g.,
support for head-less scenarios that even lack a framebuffer).

I'm looking forward to an exciting Year 2019!

Regards
-- 
Christian Helmuth
Genode Labs

https://www.genode-labs.com/ · https://genode.org/
https://twitter.com/GenodeLabs · /ˈdʒiː.nəʊd/

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