Roadmap 2023

[ttcoder at netcourrier.com]

> How did you perceive the Genode year 2022?
> 
> What directions are you most excited about?
> 
> Which topics do you deem as interesting to explore yourself?
> 
> Do you already happen to have rough plans about 2023?

Santa brought a Pinephone for my S.O. this year, she's happy and looking forward to use it (and I'm relieved my plot worked and there's no longer talk of purchasing an Android or iOS device in this home ^^)

We tried to use the OS it ships with (Manjaro/Plasma), but after a few days of use, it's broken : keeps going back to the PIN-code screen every few seconds, making it unusable ; discussion forums hint that it means Plasma keeps crashing and getting auto-restarted.

There's no Genode pre-built image yet, so I took a hint from your Genodians articles and installed LuneOS. It's been solid so far, and wow, that look and feel is slick indeed. The camera driver does not seem to handle the cams though. And their site and forums have been mostly inactive for years. Hence : I'll keep an eye out for Genode. Those start-up times sound impressive. The intended use for her will be somewhat limited : sending SMS's, Matrix or Discord, photo album, maybe a bit of web browsing. VPN features would be quite intriguing, in this day and age.

**

Re. my ongoing project of "marrying" Genode and that other system (let's call it "upstream-Hai") : the latest build is now playing music from an indexed, attributed, file system. Finally. So my years of (slow-as-molasses) work weren't for naught :-)
(@Norman: will email you my cliff-notes later on, not exactly "light" reading *g* but it seems you agree to read them anyway!)
In the spirit of good Q.A., I started running that "distro" on metal for several hours every day, to accumulate mileage, before I hopefully ship to an unsuspecting public in 2023.

Also, now that the main part of the system works, that opens the door to "secondary features", to wit:

* HDA driver:
During 2H 2022, I should look into multi-output audio, e.g. making the "line-out" jack output a different audio stream from the "headphones" jack. The BSD driver relies on a command called "mixerctl" if memory serves, will see how that translates into code-and-configuration in Genode's port of that driver. If it's incomplete I'll try to contribute the missing stuff.

* Dynamic vfs mounting:
Will soon-ish look into USB mass storage ; I presume it spawns a new component (or re-spawns an existing one) with appropriate <config>... <vfs>... nodes for reading the newly mounted USB stick/hard-drive.
Maybe re-spawning will be sufficient for my needs ; however in case it has shortcomings, I might have to look into patching Genode to make vfs config "dynamic" (that is, apply vfs plug-in mounting/unmounting without killing the host component), though that's always a difficult subject on any OS, so I'll try hard to steer clear of that if I can.

* Drag'n'drop ("cooperative"):
A much more distant prospect : it would be nice for my apps to re-enable DnD as in upstream, in addition to using file panels. It's just a vague idea at this point, not even on the 2023 drawing board yet, just a vague concept whereby each upstream-Hai app monitors mouse pointer movements and contributes/cooperates on visual feedback and internal IPC of the dragged BMessage... You could call it "make believe DnD", since it won't involve NitPicker much, it will be the apps themselves faking it. Anyway not sure whether it'll make the cut to year 2023, maybe the year after that (if the lights are still on in this part of the natostan Empire by then).

As always, thanks for giving Genode to the world, I try to pay you guys back by filing detailed and helpful tickets and such.

Cedric