Roadmap 2023

[Norman Feske]

Hi Samuel,

> 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.

thank you for having taken the time to present the broader picture. Your 
motivation becomes much more clear now.

When it comes to the road map for 2023 - covering a time horizon of one 
year - these consideration may still remain far out of our view. When 
prioritizing how we spend our next 12 months, I think that anticipating 
strategic moves of hardware vendors is a risky bet.

Cheers
Norman

-- 
Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
Genode Labs

https://www.genode-labs.com · https://genode.org

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