Roadmap 2022

[Norman Feske]

Dear Genode community,

it is the time of the year again to reflect and make plans for the
foreseeable future. Hereby, I'd like to kick off our traditional
brainstorming about Genode's road map for the year ahead of us.


What happened in the previous episode...
----------------------------------------

I have two perspectives to share. One is the look at Genode as our
project, and the other one is my personal view.

Let's start with the first one. When reviewing the past twelve months, I
am immensely proud of the accomplishments of our team. Together, we
conquered the territory of GPU support that was ridden with
uncertainties and seemed almost impenetrable when we started. Now, our
Intel GPU multiplexer has landed in Sculpt like it always belonged
there. The next highlight was witnessing the puzzle pieces of our new
Linux device-driver environment coming together, replacing former
confusion and chaos with knowledge and order, ultimately uncovering the
treasure of Linux drivers for Genode with very little friction. The
third highlight was witnessing the growing sophistication of
Genode-native workloads, with the media features of the Chromium-based
browser on 64-bit ARM being the most impressive example. Apart from the
apparent functional benefits for Genode and Sculpt OS, this is the long
outstanding validation of some arguably risky design decisions we took
many year ago, in particular the role and architecture of the VFS and
its interplay with the libc.

When reviewing the road map for 2021 [1], some items remained uncovered.
In particular the seL4-related topics became stale. One year ago when I
assembled the road map, there was a tangible prospect of a paying
customer funding this work. However, those plans were repeatedly
deferred and we don't know whether or when they will come to fruition. I
was too optimistic. Also, there are some items that have seen healthy
doses of progress - like the topics related to Ada/SPARK or Goa - but
received less attention than anticipated. On the other hand, the four
releases [2,3,4,5] of this year covered quite a few topics not
advertised at the road map, e.g., webcam support, Xilinx Zynq, or
RISC-V. Priorities shift. That's fine.

[1] https://genode.org/about/road-map
[2] https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/21.02
[3] https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/21.05
[4] https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/21.08
[5] https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/21.11

>From my personal perspective, I've wholly enjoyed the work on the
Pinephone as documented in my "Pine fun" article series at
Genodians.org [6]. Much of the enjoyment came from the _process_, in
particular the co-development of the new DDE-Linux together with Stefan,
the mutual cross-validation of ideas and code, and our joint sense of
great care. Granted, feature-wise, I missed my original goal of being
able to issue phone calls with Genode on the Pinephone by now. But the
collateral effects of the work in terms of tooling (dts_extract),
interfaces (Genode-C-API), and documentation ("Genode Platforms")
deserved the attention they got.

[6] https://genodians.org


What's up for next year?
------------------------

I'm in full swing with the Pinephone. So I will keep moving full steam
ahead. With the touchscreen and display tamed now, the next topics are
telephony, mobile-data connectivity, Sculpt, browser, and a simple user
interface. Over the year, I will increasingly focus on non-functional
aspects as well, in particular power management (battery life) and
quality of service (UI latency, audio latency). By the end of the year,
I want to be able to casually use a video-chat solution like Jitsi on
the phone.

Besides the Pinephone, I am planning to simplify and solidify Genode's
base framework by gradually removing complexity (like C++ exceptions
[7]), increasing the strictness of the coding style (like the aftermath
of [8]), and attending the most-neglected corners of our issue tracker [9].

[7] https://genodians.org/nfeske/2021-11-26-attempt-no-exceptions
[8] https://genodians.org/nfeske/2021-12-07-wconversion
[9] https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/issues


What about you?
---------------

My point of view outlined above is only one way to look at the picture.
Now I would be interested in your perspective!

What's your reflection of Genode's past year?

What are the topics you deem as most interesting to work on?

Do you already have tangible plans you can share with us?

Are there road blocks that stand in the way of your plans?

What is your vision of using Genode at the end of 2022?


I hope that this posting spawns a fruitful discussion of potential
topics for the next episode. Please be considerate to avoid dropping
mere proposals or wish lists. It's best to present suggestions together
with actionable steps that you are willing to take.

In mid of January, I am going to update the official road map.

Cheers,
Norman

-- 
Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
Genode Labs

https://www.genode-labs.com · https://genode.org

Genode Labs GmbH · Amtsgericht Dresden · HRB 28424 · Sitz Dresden
Geschäftsführer: Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske, Christian Helmuth