Roadmap 2022

[Colin Parker]

Hello Genodians,
   I will again offer my thoughts as a casual Genode user and tinkerer,
although this year I didn't get to have as much fun with it as I wanted to,
for various reasons.


> 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
>
>
My vision for Genode is to be able to run it on my (non-standard, Apple)
X86_64 hardware as a main system, virtualizing the existing Linux Mint
partition. I think some  progress has been made on this front, others have
virtualized an existing partition, and my system can boot Sculpt from EFI
with tweaks and use the FB, but the main barrier to me is that virtualizing
the USB wifi dongle I use for network access (ath9k usb) is a bit slow. So
for the past long time I've been playing with porting drivers. I think I
said in last years summary that I was able to port the HelenOS driver for
it, which ending up working partially, but the driver randomly stalls the
hardware and I can't tell how deep the issue goes, since I can't easily
simulate high network activity running it natively under HelenOS. There is
also a lot of feature-limitation in the 802.11 implementation.

So, encouraged, by one of this year's themes, I started trying to port the
linux ath9k driver. Unfortunately, I did not experience the same success as
others. For example the new lx_emul/lx_kit is conceptually very nice, and I
was excited about it, but I'm running into snags because I don't think it's
completely implemented yet for x86. It's also a little sad to me that there
is no way to take what is, under linux, a platform indepedent USB driver,
and make a platform indepedent Genode component, because the porting
process seems to depend on the architecture. I guess the actionable step
here is for me to finish porting the driver, but it would be great to know
what the plans for intel are, if the dde_linux is under development now, or
if I need to hack it myself to make it work under x86.

Best wishes to all for the new year,
CP
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