Roadmap 2023

[Norman Feske]

Hi Ben,

> 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.

thank you for these nice words! I assure you that the enjoyment is 
mutual. It was downright satisfying to see you embracing Sculpt on your 
laptop so quickly. After merely a week, I remember glancing over your 
shoulders in awe seeing how competently you administered the system, 
while effortlessly addressing remaining stumbling blocks when they appeared.

>  > 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.

With the virtualization topic, you jumped right into the deep end, and 
you stayed over water! For me personally, I'm longing for the prospect 
of running the PC version of Sculpt on the base-hw kernel. Your work 
directly contributes to that goal. I wonder, should we mention this 
prospect on the road map for this year, or would that be too eager?

> 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.

That sounds about perfect to me. As hinted by the discussion so far, Goa 
will play an ever more important role. The integration of Rust support 
will certainly elevate it further. Is this a topic you'd like to see 
appearing at the official road map? If so, could you name an attainable 
sub goal like the port of a specific application, illustrating the scope 
you have in mind?

> 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 :)

So I guess, we may leave the moon mission for 2024? ;-)

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