Roadmap 2021

[Sid Hussmann]

Dear Genodians,

Looking back on this crazy year, it is again impressive what the Genode community achieved. Ranging from ARMv8 support, over to the vastly improved libc, its thread safety, and then Martin's Consistent Block Encrypter (CBE)... Regarding the width of the audience, I believe one major aspect for the success of the Genode project is to be able to run existing code as easily as possible. Norman's Goa tool seems quite promising! In this regard, I want to thank Alexander Tormasov for initiating Go support for Genode. Can't wait to try it out!

Personally, I finished the named pipe feature of the vfs/pipe plugin to my liking [1]. The main motivation behind it was to easily stream data from pure Genode components to libc components via file-system sessions that can be attached to stdin, stdout and stderr. This feature also makes it possible to pipe several components together similarly to how it is possible on unix.

[1] https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/issues/3583

> What areas would you wish to concentrate on?

I'm interested in platform integrity. So, I'm looking forward to trying out the CBE features and maybe using a TPM as trust-anchor. As with the improved AMD support by Alexander Boettcher, I would like to investigate using its RAM encryption technique (AMD SEV). I also really like the idea of Johannes to bring tracing tools like Lttng to Genode.

> Where do you see untapped potential of Genode?

I share Stefan Kalkowski's view on Genode's resilience aspect as its biggest potential. Additional to the resiliency of the system architecture as a whole, I see potential in the stability of the libc runtime. Further, exposing the hard real-time capabilities from (some) kernels to the Genode user-land would open up new possibilities as well.

> How do you envision Genode in December 2021?

* A stable libc runtime that makes it easy and safe to port existing C/C++ code
* Go support
* Performance improvements regarding networking
* Extended ARMv8 support, namely IOMMU protection

Yours truly,
Sid



-- 
Sid Hussmann
CTO & Founder
gapfruit AG
Baarerstrasse 135
6300 Zug - Switzerland
sid.hussmann at gapfruit.com