Road map for 2021 Jan 29, 2021

Our plan for 2021 is focused on development workflows, envisions Genode on the PinePhone, and addresses GPU support.

In mid of December, we kicked off our annual brainstorming about Genode's road map on our public mailing list. The response was delightful. The topics revolved around new platforms like Rockchip SoCs and the PinePhone, system tracing, DDE Linux, self-healing, Sculpt OS, RISC-V, seL4, Go language, i.MX8, GPUs, Qt5/QML, Goa, multi-monitor support, build systems, Ada/SPARK, MNT Reform, and many more areas of interest. Of course, we cannot thoroughly pursue all of these directions. During the discussion, however, a clear picture emerged.

Official road map: https://genode.org/about/road-map

First and most inspiring for many Genode developers, we envision the use of the PinePhone as a Genode-based feature phone by the end of the year. Since this will involve substantial device-driver-related developments, the team will take this line of work as an opportunity to advance the tooling and workflows for carrying out such tasks. This, in turn, will hopefully ease the on-boarding of new driver developers in the future.

Closely related to the PinePhone scenario, the project will make optimizations a top priority this year. The opportunities are plenty, ranging from micro-optimizations, over API refinements, to architectural changes if needed.

Another recurring topic is the request for GPU support, which is required by many modern workloads such as video conferencing or streaming on mobile device. Therefore, we will revamp our past developments of GPU multiplexing on Intel hardware while also starting the investigation of GPUs on ARM-based devices.

It is safe to say that an exciting year 2021 is ahead of us.