Roadmap 2023

[Martin Stein]

Here are my 5 cents regarding the Roadmap.

2022
----

I am happy about how last year went out. With a lot of help from other
Genodians, I could bring WireGuard to Genode and develop a concept for
using a mobile HSM as trust anchor for WireGuard sessions. Then I
implemented this concept for the SmartCard-HSM 4K with form factor
USB-token and MicroSD card. As a side effect of this effort, Genode
gained support for PKCS11-compatible USB tokens in general.

Besides this main topic of 2022, I kept on looking after the NIC router
by fixing bugs and implementing feature requests. I was happy to receive
so much helpful feedback and impulses regarding this "baby" of mine :)
Furthermore, I had some minor projects like fixes for base-hw timing and
scheduling, or extending the Black-Hole component.

2023
----

These are my topics so far for the new year (roughly in order of priority):

* Base-hw multimedia performance
  * Optimizing the latency of prioritized threads on base-hw.
  * Adding support for tracing base-hw kernel threads via the TRACE
    session.
  * Re-structuring the base-hw scheduler in order to be easier to
    maintain and more performant with many priority levels.

* CBE block encryption
  * Cleaning up and consolidating the CBE-related VFS plugins.
  * Re-writing the CBE library in C++ in order to make it maintainable
    for the majority of Genode developers that are not into Ada/SPARK.
  * Fix known issues with the CBE resizing/rekeying mechanisms and
    making a plan for a self-resizing CBE.
  * Letting the File-Vault provide access to all features of the CBE.

* Networking
  * Bringing WireGuard to PinePhone Sculpt and integrating it as mobile
    VPN network back end.
  * Keeping up with the introduction of IPv6 in Genode and applying it
    for the NIC router.
  * Cleaning up the socket FS VFS-plugin.

Cheers,
Martin