Roadmap 2020

Dear Genode community, the year 2020 is approaching, which prompts me to kick off the discussion of our road map for the year to come. Before drafting plans, however, I'd like to share my personal reflections of the past 12 months. For the road map 2019, we picked "bridging worlds" as our guiding theme: (1) Lowering the friction when combining existing software with Genode, (2) Fostering interoperability with widely used protocols and APIs, and (3) Making Genode easier to approach and generally more practical. With respect to (1), we identified Genode's custom tooling (build system, run scripts, ports mechanism, depot tools) as a point of friction. They are arguably powerful and flexible but require a lot of up-front learning. This is certainly a burden unacceptable for a casual developer without a black belt in Make and Expect/Tcl. The new Goa tool rearranges the existing tools in a way that puts the concerns of casual developers into focus, allowing for the use of commodity build systems, eliminating Tcl syntax from the equation, running sub-second test cycles, and streamlining the packaging of software. On account of (2), we switched to C++17 by default, fostered the use of Java, updated Qt5, and put POSIX compatibility into the spotlight. We were eventually able to dissolve the need for our custom Unix runtime (Noux) because all features of Noux are covered by our regular libc now. Our biggest step towards (3) is the https://genodians.org website we started in winter 2019, which gives individual members of our community an easy way to present thoughts, projects, and experiences. Complementing Genode's formal documentation, it also conserves practical tips and tricks that were previously not covered in written form. When speaking of "bridging worlds", I should not forget to mention the tremendous effort to bring Sculpt-OS-like workloads to the 64-bit ARM world. Thanks to the added support for multi-core AARCH64, hardware-based virtualization, and network/USB/graphics drivers for the i.MX8 SoC, the flexibility of Sculpt OS will eventually become available on PC hardware and ARM-based devices alike. Over the course of 2019, we admittedly skipped a few topics originally mentioned on our road map. In particular, the user-visible side of Sculpt OS received less attention than originally envisioned. We also deferred several ideas we had in mind about reworking our GUI stack. Instead, we expanded our work in the areas of storage (block-level APIs, test infrastructure, block encryption) and input processing. This shift of focus is mostly attributed to the priorities of Genode Labs' customers who fund our work. Drafting plans for 2020 ----------------------- Hereby, I'll just present my personal interests and invite you to do the same. When carving out Genode's official road map for 2020 until mid of January, I will then try to condense all the input into a tangible plan. Personally, I think that after "bridging worlds", it's time for "use, consolidation, and optimization". - It is certainly too early to call Goa a success. In order to find out if we are on the right track, I want to expose Goa to as many problems as possible, primarily by the means of porting software. - I'd love to pick up our ideas about Genode's GUI stack, accommodating headless scenarios, multi-head, screen capturing, color depth, and the ability to restart drivers. - I have a huge backlog of ideas about the user-visible side of Sculpt OS, which would make Sculpt OS more pleasant to use and much more fun. E.g., - Replacing Unix/Vim-based interface of the Leitzentrale with a graphical user interface - Making the Leitzentrale's layout more logical - Keyboard-based navigation - Context-aware on-screen documentation - Settings embedded in the graph nodes of the runtime view - I see plenty of opportunities for optimization throughout the entire software stack. With the rich C runtime in place now, it becomes easier than ever to stress the system from various angles, which is a great motivator for optimization work. - Genode's binary compatibility across a variety of kernels is a key feature of the framework. I'd like to push it even further by unifying the capability-space management among all the kernel platforms. Such a consolidation would make Genode less reliant on the subtle ways how edge cases are handled by each kernel (in-kernel data structures, capability re-identification), and reduce the amount of kernel- specific code to maintain. This is merely my personal point of view. Now I'm very interested in learning about your's! Please don't hesitate to share your perspective on the project, your priorities and plans, and topics you would anticipate most. 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