Roadmap 2023

[Benjamin Lamowski]

Hi everyone,

On 12/26/22 16:58, Norman Feske wrote:

 > How did you perceive the Genode year 2022?

First of all, I want to take the opportunity to thank the team at Genode 
Labs for the warm welcome! I joined Genode Labs just before the 22.10 
Sculpt OS release and I was quite impressed by the speed at which 
remaining blockers were resolved and how my colleagues still found time 
for onboarding and even development outside of the scope of the release.

Thanks to the maturity of the framework and the documentation I found it 
quite easy to get an initial development setup running. After stumbling 
into pitfalls and learning many tricks, I was able to take advantage of 
Genode's advanced development infrastructure (such as testing via Intel 
AMT) and I was pleased to discover that I could use Sculpt OS almost out 
of the box on an Intel Gen12 Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Nano. My focus in the 
past weeks has since been x86 virtualization for base-hw.

Outside of my own work, it appears to me that the migration to the 
generic platform API marks a major milestone, and that the attention to 
detail going into the Pinephone as a non-PC platform has led to new 
perspectives on the Genode OS framework.


 > What directions are you most excited about?

For the Genode ecosystem, I'm curious how the porting of applications to 
Sculpt on the Pinephone will pan out.
On an architectural level, I'm excited to see in which direction the 
framework API will evolve.
Finally, I hope that I will be able to scratch some remaining itches 
that I have with my Intel Gen12 development machine.


 > Which topics do you deem as interesting to explore yourself?
 >
 > Do you already happen to have rough plans about 2023?

For the first part of the year, my focus will remain on bringing support 
for x86 virtualization to the base-hw kernel, as I see this as an 
important step to have a more integrated experience across processor 
architectures.

Regarding the Intel Gen12 work, I think that initially I will mostly 
benefit from the effort that Alex and Norman are already putting into 
the project, but I should at least be able help with testing. I would be 
interested in exploring ways to integrate power management into Genode.

As a side project, I would love to revive Genode's Rust port.
Initially:
- Make rustc build binaries that are linked against Genode's libc
- Add support for building Rust applications (i.e. cargo) to Goa
This will broaden the scope of existing applications that can be moved 
to Sculpt.
As a moonshot goal, it would be interesting to explore what a native 
Genode Rust RPC API could look like, but first I still need to learn a 
lot more about the existing C++ API :)

Best wishes,

Ben