Roadmap 2024

[Johannes Schlatow]

Hi Norman,
Hi Genodians,

> 
> Reflections of 2023
> 

Reflecting on the last year, I'm very pleased with the results. Even 
though, I had other plans in mind, I really enjoyed what eventually 
landed on my plate.

Taking over Goa's maintenance role sparked a plethora of ideas. It was 
fun implementing some of those like the index-project support and bash 
completion; I am thrilled to see the tool mature further. I appreciate 
all the contributions, especially Pirmin's shared-library support, which 
I regard as a game-changer w.r.t. Goa's autonomy.

I spent a great part of the year working on DMA protection. Initiated by 
my work on the Zynq-7000 SoC, for which I developed a custom DMA guard 
IP core, I integrated support for IOMMU-like devices into the platform 
driver. Later that year, I could build upon this to integrate Intel DMA 
remapping support into the platform driver, which bit off a big chunk of 
the kernel-agnostic IOMMU support.

> 
> Plans for 2024
> 

I share Norman's ambitions for focusing on Sculpt OS usability. I think 
Goa can play an important role for the development of utility 
applications. I'm thinking of a USB passthrough GUI, a NIC router 
port-forwarding GUI, or a file launcher GUI. As mentioned in last year's 
roadmap, it would be great being able to download a PDF with Falkon and 
open it with mupdf. My plans are to pick one or two to further test 
Goa's practicality for app development and share the process on 
genodians.org. My ultimate goal would be to assemble a third Genode book 
that focuses on application development.

Besides these app-focused topics, I still have a few low-level topics on 
my plate. First, there is the kernel-agnostic IOMMU support that still 
lacks IRQ-remapping support to be complete. Second, I'm expecting new 
hardware devices on which I'd like to test-run Sculpt. One device is a 
ZimaBlade single-board server, which I'd like to use as a new VM host 
for my home server. I believe it could make an interesting use case for 
a headless Sculpt deployment. The other device is a StarLite tablet, 
which I will mainly use for browsing and which should serve for testing 
Sculpt's usability on tablet-like devices.

Another intriguing idea is to try running Goa natively on Genode. This 
would make a pretty cool demo, yet, I'd not like to schedule it on this 
year's roadmap but rather keep it in mind for the next year(s).

Best regards
Johannes