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<body class='hmmessage'><div dir='ltr'>Happy New Year!<div><br></div><div>I, for one, will be spending time on base-hw, hopefully full time in second quarter '14. Main focus will be on arm a7-cortex, although I should be able to find time for RPi and OpenRisc. Should be able to contribute something towards making base-hw 'the' first-tier platform by the end of the year ;)</div><div><br></div><div>Cheers,</div><div>Nick<br><br><div>> Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2014 12:27:27 +0100<br>> From: norman.feske@...1...<br>> To: genode-main@lists.sourceforge.net<br>> Subject: Roadmap 2014<br>> <br>> Happy New Year everybody!<br>> <br>> Leaving the year 2013 behind us, it's time to recapture what we achieved<br>> in the past 12 months and to lay out the activities for this year. I am<br>> planning to update our official road map by mid of January and seek your<br>> input for doing so.<br>> <br>> <br>> Review of the past year<br>> -----------------------<br>> <br>> In 2013, we worked on four construction sites: Framework infrastructure,<br>> self-hosting, tooling and optimization, and hardware support. When<br>> reviewing the road map for 2013, it is great to see that we largely<br>> lived up to our planning.<br>> <br>> The framework infrastructure was enhanced with concepts for managing<br>> CPUs on multi-processor systems and for dynamically balancing memory<br>> resources, it received new audio and file-system capabilities, and, with<br>> the addition of Qt5 and the lxIP stack, we could enable highly<br>> sophisticated workloads natively on Genode.<br>> <br>> On our endeavour of self-hosting Genode on Genode, we could eliminate<br>> long-standing show stoppers for several base platforms. We were able to<br>> improve them to the point where we can routinely execute Genode's tool<br>> chain across several base platforms such as NOVA and Fiasco.OC as part<br>> of our nightly automated tests. On the user-facing side, a new<br>> command-line interface has seen the light of the day.<br>> <br>> Two highlights when it comes to tooling were the new event tracing<br>> facilities, and profound support for automated testing. Thanks to the<br>> latter, we expose Genode to over 500 test runs including automated<br>> performance benchmarks. By executing those tests each night, we have<br>> become able to resolve regressions before they enter the master branch.<br>> So the master branch remains always in a good shape.<br>> <br>> As expected for an operating-system project, most of our work was spent<br>> on hardware support. On x86, we added IOMMU support, and the<br>> virtualization capabilities on NOVA have seen a major upgrade. On ARM,<br>> we enabled or vastly enhanced the device drivers for Samsung Exynos 5,<br>> Freescale i.MX, and Raspberry Pi. We also explored the possibilities of<br>> combining Genode with ARM TrustZone.<br>> <br>> Only two topics, namely Intel wireless and a new user interface concept<br>> had been deferred. We decided to postpone the Intel wireless topic to<br>> address gigabit networking instead. Even though the new user-interface<br>> concept served as a strong motivation behind many improvements of the<br>> base system such as dynamic reconfiguration and dynamic resource<br>> balancing, the work on those fundamentals left little room to bring<br>> forward the actual GUI concept. Now that those pieces are in place, we<br>> can go full steam ahead.<br>> <br>> The most surprising topic that was not clearly laid out in our last<br>> year's road map is the advancement of the base-hw platform. Started as a<br>> mere experiment, it received so much love and attention that it<br>> unexpectedly became able to host the whole universe of Genode's software<br>> stack.<br>> <br>> <br>> What are we up to?<br>> ------------------<br>> <br>> Well, the answer to this question is not set in stone. Here are my<br>> suggestions:<br>> <br>> * Improved handling of 3rd-party code:<br>> Many new users of Genode stumble over the installation of<br>> 3rd-party code. It is not obvious to see which packages are<br>> required for a particular run script. Instead, users have to deal<br>> with confusing error messages when a needed package is not<br>> installed. We should definitely fix this inconvenience.<br>> <br>> * The base-hw platform<br>> * Multi-processor support<br>> * Kernel-protected capability-based security<br>> * Exploring ARM's virtualization extensions<br>> <br>> * C runtime:<br>> * Revisit libc plugin concept to make the configuration of per-<br>> process virtual file systems as easy as it is for Noux. By<br>> making Noux' VFS implementation reusable for the libc, normal<br>> Genode programs could leverage stacked file systems in very<br>> flexible ways.<br>> * Abandon helper threads in favour for asynchronous I/O handling,<br>> improving performance and the simplicity of the libc-internal<br>> code.<br>> <br>> * Storage:<br>> The work on the file-system stack is in full swing. Personally, I<br>> desire a journaling file system as well as a block cache.<br>> <br>> * Device drivers:<br>> * Intel wireless<br>> * Merged SATA drivers: Right now, the high-performance SATA 3.0<br>> driver for the Exynos-5 SoC does not share any code with the<br>> older SATA driver for x86. We should consolidate both<br>> implementations to get good disk performance on x86.<br>> <br>> * Virtualization on NOVA/x86:<br>> Port of a "mainstream" VMM to Genode/NOVA. I am a fan of the Seoul<br>> (ex Vanvouver) VMM. However, I get repeatedly asked for features<br>> that people universally expect but that are unavailable on Seoul,<br>> i.e., Windows guest support. In the future, I'd like to pull a<br>> positive answer to such questions out of my sleeve.<br>> <br>> * User-interface concept:<br>> This topic must look like a running gag, but it is not. :-)<br>> <br>> * Hardware-accelerated graphics:<br>> Even though we looked into this topic some years ago with the<br>> experimental port of Gallium3D and the Intel GPU driver, we left<br>> the code almost unattended since then. However, with more and more<br>> software relying on OpenGL ES2.0 (I am looking at QML in<br>> particular), we definitely need to re-address the problem. In the<br>> meantime, the Intel Linux graphics stack and Mesa have advanced a<br>> lot. So we might even start looking at the problem from scratch.<br>> <br>> * Noux performance optimizations:<br>> The Noux runtime has reached a state where it runs Unix tools<br>> including GCC reliably. But it is not very fast in doing so. To<br>> make it more pleasant to use Noux for day-to-day work, we should<br>> start to optimize.<br>> <br>> <br>> The points above are merely my personal preferences.<br>> <br>> What are topics that you wish to see in Genode throughout the year 2014?<br>> Or are you working on a particular feature that you plan to integrate<br>> into Genode?<br>> <br>> Cheers<br>> Norman<br>> <br>> -- <br>> Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske<br>> Genode Labs<br>> <br>> http://www.genode-labs.com · http://genode.org<br>> <br>> Genode Labs GmbH · Amtsgericht Dresden · HRB 28424 · Sitz Dresden<br>> Geschäftsführer: Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske, Christian Helmuth<br>> <br>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>> Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT <br>> organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance <br>> affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your <br>> Java,.NET, & PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro!<br>> http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk<br>> _______________________________________________<br>> Genode-main mailing list<br>> Genode-main@lists.sourceforge.net<br>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/genode-main<br></div></div> </div></body>
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