Roadmap 2021

[Christian Helmuth]

Dear Genodians,

first (as each X-mas in the past years) thanks to Norman for opening
the roadmap discussion with a thorough reflection of activities and
achievements of 2020.

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 14:58:49 CET, Norman Feske wrote:
> How do you perceive the outcome of the year?

Looking at my rough personal plans from 12 months ago I get mixed
feelings. First, the network appliance topic again experienced very
little attention. While I approached it from a new angle making some
progress with the uacme client for Genodians.org and the OpenSSL
update until May, the work remained on a topic branch and I got
entirely occupied by other tasks up to now. It seems I need a
different strategy for 2021 but seem to lack a plan yet.

The other topics I identified end of 2019 give a more positive
picture, especially because of the excellent efforts of my fellow
Genode developers. There's still demand for more work in following
fields.

- Complete LibC thread safety

  We worked hard on the robustness of the LibC runtime and
  multi-threaded networking in particular since 20.05 and made quite
  good progress. But the recent issue [1] and the still open [2]
  indicate demand for more attention. In this regard I still see the
  requirement for improved "Continuous POSIX-compliance testing".

[1] https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/issues/3969#issuecomment-748146578
[2] https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/issues/725

- Cultivation of Goa as porting environment

  With uacme I started my first port based on the Goa tool and the
  first steps where pretty promising. I'd love to see more
  applications finding their path to Genode on account of this tool.

> What areas would you wish to concentrate on?

I struggle to draft my future Genode developments as the past showed
I'm prone to wrong forecasts in this regard. My role seems to be more
in filling gaps on demand and helping out. I'd love to add my share to
accomplish a nice and tidy Genode phone though.

But beyond that, I expect to continue my intensive work on VirtualBox
in all facets, may it be features, optimizations, or breaking new
grounds with support for efficient guest graphics. Also definitely on
the list is the integration of uacme into Genodians.org.

I'm looking forward to another exciting Genode year.

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