Roadmap 2023

[Stefan Kalkowski]

Hello Genode community,

On Mon, Dec 26, 2022 at 04:58:36PM +0100, Norman Feske wrote:
> Even though I hope that the thoughts above resonate with you, I'm pretty
> sure you have different perspectives. Please share them!
> 
> How did you perceive the Genode year 2022?

I can only affiliate myself to the previous mails that the Genode OS
framework made a lot of progress in 2022, compared to the limited
size of the developing community.
Personally, I was much absorbed by the transformation of the low-level
platform abstractions into a generic platform API, and the re-design of
the Linux driver ports resp. its Genode backends. Thereby, I was
much more involved into topics like PCI bus parsing, BIOS/UEFI
handover, and other PC-related things than in the past. Which is not
always fun, but anyway a broadening of mind.
It was a pleasure for me to see how most re-newed driver ports,
performed by my colleagues at Genode Labs and other community members,
were done much faster now, because of the reconsidered porting
approach.

> What directions are you most excited about?

I'm most excited about new analysis tools, like the trace recorder,
and the performance analysis that Christian, Norman, Johannes, and all
others have done, e.g., to make some Pinephone scenarios possible. To
me this is most interesting, because I want use more native Genode
applications in my daily life, especially on lower-speed platforms
like the MNT Reform2.

> Which topics do you deem as interesting to explore yourself?

I would like to finalize the platform support for the MNT Reform 2.
Now, I can drive most devices, and the virtualization solution on ARM
has evolved too. Anyway, WIFI and audio support is still missing.
Moreover, the virtualization solution will probably show some issues
in daily life usage. Shared folder support is an open issue here. And
I have to decide how to deal whith scenarios where I've used
Virtualbox with USB device passthrough in the past (USB UART terminal,
etc.)

> Do you already happen to have rough plans about 2023?

A lot of interesting new projects and perspectives got already
mentioned by others.
Personally I wouldn't like to loose sight of the changes in
progress that did not finished yet. For instance, we have already
changed a number of driver ports to use the new porting approach and a
recent original code base. But few drivers and protocol stacks are
still missing, first and foremost the Linux IP/Stack (4.4.3), the USB
client driver ports like HID and NIC, the IPXE NIC drivers with known
restarting issues, USB host driver relicts for RPI1 and
i.MX6, etc.. I feel responsible at least to take part in releasing from old
burdens.
Moreover, I would like to push the idea from Christian to bring the
ACPI integration to an end by initially discovering these platform
internals completely.

Regards
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Kalkowski
Genode labs

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