Roadmap 2021

[Stefan Kalkowski]

Dear Genode community,

thank you Norman for initiating the roadmap debate again, and for
sharing your thoughts. Here is my input to it.

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 02:58:49PM +0100, Norman Feske wrote:
> 
> What's your perspective?
> ------------------------
> 
> For drafting the road map of next year, I'm eagerly interested in
> the perspective of my fellow developers and of course users of
> Genode.
> 
> How do you perceive the outcome of the year?

I agree with your perception that we did not achieved to reach a new,
wide audience for Genode topics. Anyway, I see signs for a slowly, but
consistently growing ecosystem around Genode in the shape of new, and
remained users, and companies docking to our development steadily.
And I think the steps done, regarding ARM64 development in this year
in general, and around the i.MX8MQ SoC in particular, leverage
Genode's potential for an increasing community.

Personally, I'm a bit disappointed by myself, because I was dead set
on enabling Sculpt OS on the MNT Reform 2 by the end of the year. But
although it is almost done, I have not finished yet due to some
hardware, and driver issues. Anyway, I'm keen to catch up.

> 
> What areas would you wish to concentrate on?
> 

To me the further development of Genode/Sculpt as desktop OS on ARM
machines stays in focus. Thereby, I see lots of overlaps with Norman's
plans regarding Genode on a mobile phone, aka pinephone.

Technically, the biggest issue to me is still the driver ecosystem.
Hereby, we already discussed (offline) alternative approaches for
cheaper Linux device driver ports, which I would like to follow.

The further marriage of the x86 and ARM driver ecosystem is another
heartfelt wish of me. Hereby, the coalescense of the platform driver
API of both architectures is essential, which I would like to
implement.

Beside the extension of the ARM VMM to use it for my productive daily
development VM on the MNT Reform, I really would like to use mutt mail
setup on Genode finally.

> Where do you see untapped potential of Genode?

I still see Genode's resilience aspect as its biggest potential that
is nevertheless not yet fully achieved. A system with solid core/init
and resource multiplexers, no resource exhaustion, with restartable
drivers, which can live as long as the hardware without the need to
reboot. I think we are much closer to achieve that now.

> 
> How do you envision Genode in December 2021?
> 

Well, using the MNT Reform 2 with one hand, while holding the
Pinephone in the other hand - both systems running Genode in a
technically mature form to handle my daily routine. That would be more
than I can dream of technically-wise.

Best regards
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Kalkowski
Genode labs

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