Roadmap 2023

[Norman Feske]

Hello Edoardo,

> Now, Norman, I have some questions for you:
> 1) do you want to port Genode also on other Smartphone models?

since you are addressing me personally, I'm not planning to lead such an 
effort. My high motivation behind the PinePhone line of development 
stems from the following three points.

1. Proving that Genode can accommodate the (in my opinion) most
    demanding device category besides PCs.
    Running Sculpt on the PinePhone brings this point home.
    Now we know what it takes, and we dispelled countless technical
    and architectural risks along the way.

2. Attaining the guidance documentation needed by 3rd parties to
    port Genode to other platforms. For me, not the working code but
    the Genode Platforms [1] document is the most essential outcome
    of this work. It essential removes Genode's core team off the
    critical path for platform enablement.

3. Personally using Sculpt OS on both my laptop and my mobile
    companion device, satisfying my desire of ultimate control over
    the devices I rely on.

[1] https://genode.org/documentation/genode-platforms-22-05.pdf

Enabling a second smartphone myself would not contribute to these 
objectives.

Instead, having an independent developer (or team) proving that the 
"Genode Platform" documentation fulfills its purpose would be much more 
interesting to me.

Given this rationale, I would (very) gladly assist someone outside of 
Genode Labs with such an effort. Should you decide to go that way, you 
can count on my support.

> for 1), I think it could be possible to boot genode on other smartphone,
> ideally, we could try to change the android boot image: we maintain the
> header (or the aboot  [the android bootloader/third stage bootloader] will
> refuse to load it] but, instead of taking the android kernel code, we write
> the genode code (an objdump trick will be helpful). From next week, I'll
> work directly on this, by using kexec on my modded android smartphone; Note
> that is also possible to do that at a lower level, with some qualcomm
> chipset (sdm845 and similar, if you search windows 10 on sdm845, you will
> see that many peoples have played with efi in order to allow the running of
> different OSes, this is possible only on a limited plethora of smartphones,
> but could give additional life to the Genode project).

Reading that paragraph, I feel that I was very lucky that the PinePhone 
just allows me throwing an SD-card into the phone and boot from that. ;-)

If you happen to find a workable way to boot Genode on a broader range 
of consumer devices, that would certainly be appreciated.

 > 2) Do you think it would be possible to integrate Genode for working
 > with 4/5G?

We have used the MBIM protocol in earlier work [1] but haven't enabled 
QMI so far.

For the PinePhone, I picked the path of least complexity. By talking 
over UART with the modem, we don't need a USB host-controller driver for 
basic features like telephony. So when booting the phone up to 
feature-phone functionality, Genode does not even need to start an USB 
HCD driver. Additionally, the UART interface gives us the principle 
opportunity to let the SCP (a little system-control processor besides 
the ARM core) interact with the modem.

I agree, for a more general solution there will probably be no way 
around using a binary protocol over USB.

[1] https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/21.02#LTE_modem_stack

As a bottom line, a porting effort to other smartphones is beyond the 
scope of the road map for 2023. But it goes without saying our actual 
ambitions go far beyond the PinePhone.

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