Roadmap 2024

[Norman Feske]

Hi Pirmin,

thank you very much for joining our road-map discussion.

> When testing out my new Toy (MinisForum UM790 Pro, AMD CPU with an 
> integrated GPU), I was pleasantly surprised, that Sculpt did run out of 
> the box on it. I did no deeper analysis what drivers it did use, but I 
> was able to run the Falcon browser preset.

Given that we don't stress Sculpt on AMD, this is indeed pleasantly 
surprising. Thanks for sharing this happy anecdote. :-)

>> Can you share your ambitions or even concrete plans?
> 
> Reflections on 2023
> 
> I did some initial testing with the first image of Sculpt for the 
> Pinephone. But as my setup at home doesn't want to connect the ADB to my 
> development virtual machine, I never came around to answer Normans 
> questions regarding my results, sorry for that. Hopefully I will be able 
> to figure this out at the 2024 Hack'n'Hike.

Can't wait to stick our heads together at the Hack'n'Hike!

> I did some progress with my NIC-driver for the Intel-IGC NIC driver. It 
> did start, but no communication yet. Around the Sculpt 23.10 release I 
> started the integration of IGC support in to the new nic_drv for the PC 
> platform. This in its current state sends out DHCP requests, but for 
> some reason the responses aren't sent back to the `nic_router`.
> 
> My other plans were to port Neovim using Goa and porting the 
> frame-buffer driver for AMD GPUs. On these I didn't really work as my 
> time was used up otherwise.

Even if you haven't put Goa into practice for the actual Neovim porting, 
your contributions to Goa - in particular the shared-library topic - 
certainly played in important role for the tool's evolution in the past 
year.

> Plans for 2024
> 
> For this year I would like to do the following:
>   - finish the integration of the IGC driver and provide it upstream
>   - Re-start the development of the framebuffer driver
>   - tryout how to bring multi monitor support for Sculpt
> 
>> How and where would you like to see Genode at the end of 2024?
> 
> If the GUI stack improvements would bring multi monitor support I would 
> be very happy.

You are not alone with this sentiment about multi-monitor support. So we 
should definitely aim to get it covered in 2024. It will be a 
challenging topic because it touches the whole GUI stack (drivers, 
nitpicker, wm, decorators, window layouter, GUI clients). But we could 
hardly speak of "Sculpt OS usability" in 2024 with a straight face 
without having a solid implementation of this feature.

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