Road map for 2022 Jan 30, 2022

Genode's guiding theme for 2022 will be "Mobile Usability".

At the advent of each year, we invite our community to reflect on the achievements of the past 12 months and to sketch plans for the year ahead of us. Speaking of achievements, three topics stood out in 2021. First, with hardware-accelerated graphics, we successfully conquered a topic that seemed almost impenetrable when we started. Second, with the native execution of the Chromium browser engine on Genode, we managed to bring the most sophisticated workload in Genode's history to run directly on the framework. And third, we found a tenable way to transplant Linux kernel drivers to Genode with extremely little friction, thereby unlocking a wealth of potential hardware platforms for Genode.

The latter topic ultimately cleared the way to run interactive Genode system scenarios on the PinePhone in December 2021. That gave us one of many reasons to celebrate!

Looking ahead, we are eager to build upon these breakthroughs of the past year. In particular, we envision rich application workloads - in particular WebRTC-based video chat - using Genode on the PinePhone by the end of 2022. This vision calls for a variety of challenging topics to work on. For the first time, we have to face aggressive power management. The constrained hardware of the PinePhone also calls for far-reaching optimizations to achieve decent multimedia performance and pleasantly low latency. Hence, the guiding theme of 2022 will subsume this line of work as "Mobile Usability".

We will also put a broad update of our PC drivers on our agenda to accommodate users of Sculpt OS on modern generations of Intel hardware. As an additional line of development, we are excited to intensify the combination of Genode with reconfigurable hardware.

More details about our road map for 2022 - including a rough schedule of our developments - is available at our Genode's official road-map page.