Roadmap 2023

[Colin Parker]


Hello Genodians,
   Last year was a good year in Genode for me. I poke around with it at the hobby level, but this year I saw the drivers system substantially re-worked and I was able to successfully port a Linux driver.

> What directions are you most excited about?

Although many others are excited about Sculpt on phones and SOC/SBC scenarios, I remain excited about the prospect of improving Sculpt on “conventional” machines like laptops and (mini)towers. My thoughts on where things could be:

1) The default Sculpt image can probably be made to boot already on almost any x86 system. A few tweaks could help such as allowing command-line arguments from the boot loader to boot in “safe” mode, forcing fallback to the boot loader’s frame buffer.

2) The default Sculpt configuration is great and provides a low barrier to new users to at least try Sculpt. But to work seriously in Sculpt one wants to install a VM, which is many steps, and to virtualize and already-installed OS is even more steps. It would be fantastic if one could, out-of-the box, virtualize an installed OS. If that’s too much, it might be worth curating USB stick images with pre-installed VM partitions.

> 
> Which topics do you deem as interesting to explore yourself?

I might poke around with (2) above, at least trying to follow the existing instructions.

I may also try to port some more Linux drivers. I’m curious where Sculpt will go with that - will it be towards live selection of drivers at boot time, like in most Linux distros, or is the idea for lean purpose-built images that contain only the drivers necessarily for a given system?

Happy new year to all!