Roadmap 2020

[Christian Helmuth]

Hello Genodians,

looking back at 2019, I see quite a few achievements, some matching
our planned goals laid out on the road map and some more motivated by
needs of Genode users and customers of Genode Labs. I'd like to thank
all guys from Genode Labs and external contributors alike for an
eventful and prolific Genode year. A particular highlight for me was
the first Genode Community Summer event, which despite my initial
scepticism was an entire success and makes a well-balanced Genode year
towards FOSDEM and Hack'n'Hike in the first half. I'm definitely in
for a renewal in August/September.

In retrospect (and like the years before), my personal objectives for
2019 drafted in January experienced mixed attention. This said, I
contributed my share to Genodians.org but not as much as I liked. This
is strongly linked to the fact that my planned work on Genode network
appliances had to make room for various other important tasks.

Nonetheless, I'd like to put the Genode-based router and NAS vault on
the agenda again this year as this topic holds huge potential to
showcase Genode's strengths. Beside the scenarios themselves,
challenges of this topic are:

- Performance and robustness of the network stack including drivers,
  protocol implementation and the NIC router as well as the LibC and
  VFS integration
- Secured network protocols (SSL, SSH, wireguard) depending on the
  application
- Configuration interface

Beyond this Steckenpferd, I expect a load of other opportunities to
lend a hand from low-level debugging over tool-chain peculiarities and
Goa-based software porting right up to the development of entire
complex scenarios as in the years before. Therefore, I hesitate to
commit to one or more of the following topics that are becoming more
important now as we are "using and consolidating".

- Complete LibC thread safety
- Improved STL support (e.g., threading and mutexes)
- Continuous POSIX-compliance testing
- Decoupling Qt5 from Genode sources with Goa

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