Roadmap 2023

[Samuel Crow]

Thanks for your reply, Norman!

The reason I thought of using WebAssembly modules as a distribution method was that 
Linux graphics drivers are seldom as independent of binary blobs as other Linux 
drivers.  One NVidia card I had had become incompatible with the Linux kernel 
during an upgrade despite having worked well for years.  Linux has an unstable 
ABI so the binary blobs within the closed-source driver didn't have the correct
offsets for the kernel modules after the version 5 kernel update.

Recently, NVidia started embedding RISC-V controllers into their cards so that the 
drivers can be implemented as a simple message passing driver instead of the 
elaborate driver designs of the past.  This makes their pledges of making closed 
source drivers on Linux a thing of the past, a reasonable thing to expect.

I hope that other drivers can become pure open-source as well.  With network 
adapters, I'm not so hopeful.  That's why I think that the binary blobs used by 
the network adapter companies are WebAssembly outside the browser.  It might not
happen overnight but as WebAssembly compilers become better, perhaps binary blobs
will become a thing of the past or at least use a common bytecode like WebAssembly.

Maybe next year the backlash against binary blobs will become sufficient to adopt 
new standards.  Until then, I'm looking forward to a Genode PinePhone.

Sincerely,

Samuel D. Crow