Sculpt on base-hw (was: Re: Roadmap 2020)

[Stefan Kalkowski]

Hi John,

On Thu, Jan 09, 2020 at 03:55:52PM -0500, John J. Karcher wrote:
> This is more of a curiosity question than a request, but what is the status
> of Sculpt running on base-hw?  A few months ago I tried it, and it seemed to
> work, but ran very slowly.
> 
> Is this a near-term goal?  (I thought it was on the roadmap in the past, but
> I can't find it.)

It certainly is! Unfortunately, there is no hardware-assisted
virtualization available for hw/x86 yet, which is the biggest
showstopper functionality-wise right now.
But at least on ARM we will hopefully see something running quite
soon.

Regarding the performance penalities: it might be just missing page
attributes (write-combining) for the framebuffer memory, which leads
to a poor interactive behaviour. Another point is that base-hw does
not provide hard realtime priorities but implements as the only kernel
Genode's concept of CPU quota. But in the current sculpt scenario
there are no cpu quotas defined. Therefore, several latency-critical
components, like the timer, are scheduled round-robin as all other
components. We certainly have to investigate this.

Best regards
Stefan

> 
>  Thanks!
> 
>   John J. Karcher
>   devuser at alternateapproach.com
> 
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-- 
Stefan Kalkowski
Genode labs

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