Roadmap 2022

[Stefan Kalkowski]

A happy and healthy new year to all of you fellow genodians!

Here are my thoughts regarding the past year and upcoming roadmap:

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

I share the enthusiasm Norman described regarding our joint efforts to
facilitate the porting of existing device drivers especially Linux
device drivers to Genode. A sometimes painful but nonetheless
motivating work. Also I did not expected that so much drivers will be
ported using the new approach in such a short period of time.

Nevertheless, this line of work prevented me to achieve the
unification of the platform driver API across different architectures
in time. Although it is almost accomplished, the original goal was
to finish it in 21.05. Inwardly, I dreamed of having a working Wifi
card in Sculpt on the MNT Reform 2 at this time, which is not the
case.

Anyway, when looking at the great steps regarding GPU support and the
heavy workloads, e.g., the Falkon webbrowser is capable to manage on
top of Genode, that is great!

Deeply impressed I am about the contributions from our community just
out of enthusiasm, like the extended VirtIO support from Piotr Tworek,
or the tireless Tomasz Gajewski working on all kinds of Raspberry Pi
support.

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

Well obviously I want to finish the unification and re-newal of the
platform driver and PCI landscape. Deprecate all older drivers during
this year, and move them to their corresponding SoC/Board
repositories.
I would like to enable WiFi and NVMe on the MNT Reform2 and like to
consolidate the current driver landscape to minimize performance
overhead e.g. with respect to timer service usage when running a
significant number of drivers concurrently.

Currently, I cannot use the MNT Reform2 with Sculpt OS as daily
driver, because for various use-cases I still need a Linux VM.
Therefore, I would like to extend the ARM VMM to provide VirtIO
GPU/Framebuffer and Input devices.

> Do you already have tangible plans you can share with us?
> 
> Are there road blocks that stand in the way of your plans?

I would not call them road blocks, but while analyzing the
requirements of a re-newed platform driver implementation, I was
wondering whether we still need to support ancient kernels like
Pistachio, or the old Fiasco. Apart from the dependencies on quite old
hardware of these kernels, a lot of workloads are not possible to run
on them. We have to ignore the nightly kernel faults etc. of
especially Pistachio. Therefore, I would suggest to retire these
kernels within 2022.

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

Receiving a second-factor authentication code via SMS on the
Genode/Pinephone while loging-in to some web service using Sculpt on
my MNT Reform2 that would be nice ;-).

Best regards
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Kalkowski
Genode labs

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