Roadmap 2024

[Norman Feske]

Hello everyone,

in his most recent posting, Credric already noted that now is the time 
of year again to reflect on our achievements of this year and to 
anticipate topics to pursue next year. To keep up with this fine 
tradition, let me kick off our road-map discussion with my personal 
perspective.


Reflections of 2023

As indicated by the overarching theme of the last roadmap "Rocking the 
platforms we support!", Genode's four releases of 2023 had a strong 
focus on low-level platform work. This has been especially visible on 
modern PC platforms like the Gen12 Framework laptop I have under my 
fingertips right now. At the beginning of 2023, Sculpt OS was in 
principle working on this machine, but with compromises that spoiled the 
user experience: fan noise, an erratic touchpad (using the firmware's 
PS/2 emulation), Fn key having no effect, strange issues when 
re-plugging an external display, and no indication of the battery state. 
In the meantime, not only are all these rough edges gone, but we even 
gained the ability to exercise precise control over the machine' 
performance/frequency/temperature/power characteristics using an 
interactive GUI. I think it's fair so say that Genode advanced far 
beyond the state of "working" and has entered the territory of "rocking".

I wish to name four further personal highlights of the year:

First, we got the mobile version of Sculpt OS into the hands of a pilot 
group of users who provided instructive feedback to us. From my 
perspective, the system-update mechanism that I created for this purpose 
turned out to be an almost pivotal point in the evolution of Sculpt OS 
because it reduces the effort and risk of test-driving experimental 
versions to almost zero. It was a pleasure to see how e.g., Johannes 
leveraged this new way of gathering feedback for his IOMMU line of work. 
Providing system images for testing has become a second nature.

Second, the road map for 2023 envisioned Sculpt OS running on our custom 
base-hw kernel on the PC. We identified DMA protection and 
virtualization support as the two remaining showstoppers. With much 
excitement, I followed how both of these deeply technical topics got 
covered over the course of the year.

Third, Goa finally emerged from a personal project of mine to an 
official Genode project led by Johannes. I'm stunned how much the 
project benefited from this change. All of the remaining backlog of my 
vague plans - I'm thinking of the index-project support or bash 
completion - got eventually realized in a way true to the spirit of the 
project. The fate of the Goa tool makes me immensely happy.

Fourth, during the first half of the year, I found myself intensively 
working on Genode's new debug-monitor component, pursuing the idea to 
implement a debugging instrument as a specialized version of init 
augmented with the GDB protocol. This engagement was pretty much 
motivated by a customer. The result of my initial work then seamlessly 
transitioned into the hands of Christian Prochaska who did a marvelous 
job with steadily advancing this line of work towards our joint vision 
of on-target debugging on Sculpt OS. The technical feats 
notwithstanding, I found the frictionless way of collaborating a pure joy.

Besides the highlights above, one topic close to my heart was the 
creation of the dialog API that I designed as necessity to make the code 
of Sculpt's administrative user interface maintainable and easy to 
extend in the longer run.

Plans for 2024

After concentrating so intensively on topics below the surface, I now 
long for reaping user-visible rewards. Speaking of the dialog API just 
mentioned, I see potential in using this new infrastructure for 
Genode-native applications and immediately think of the file manager 
that I already wanted to tackle this year. But I also have plenty of 
ideas to make Sculpt OS more user friendly. What about presenting the 
README files of software packages directly in the GUI? Making the 
component graph scrollable? Allowing the user to select an arbitrary 
directory as a file system to a component? Buttons for saving the 
current deployment or the settings?

Beyond Sculpt's administrative user interface, I'd also like to attend 
the GUI stack. I think of refining the GUI-session interface to remove 
tearing artifacts, to better support desktop-UI-paradigms like 
drag'n'drop, and to explore the opportunity of using nitpicker's 
mechanisms at the application-level, not only at the window-composition 
level.

Hence, I'd condense my ambition for the next year to "Sculpt OS usability".

Device-wise, I'm going to continue my engagement with the PinePhone and 
look forward to the upcoming MNT PocketReform laptop.


Above I presented my personal view. How about your's? I would very much 
appreciate you sharing your feedback, ideas, concerns, and plans 
regarding Genode.

How are your interests aligned with the perspective shared above?

Do you see specific pain points that deserve the attention of Genode's 
core developer team?

What is your perspective on Genode's past year's accomplishments?

Can you share your ambitions or even concrete plans?

How and where would you like to see Genode at the end of 2024?


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