===================================================== Genode Labs Newsletter - December 2021 / January 2022 ===================================================== Content 1. Road map for 2022 2. Meet us this weekend at (virtual) FOSDEM! 3. The story of Genode's Browser Odyssey 1. Road map for 2022 -------------------- 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 public road map page: https://genode.org/about/road-map 2. Meet us this weekend at (virtual) FOSDEM! -------------------------------------------- In the previous newsletter, we already announced our participation in this year's virtual FOSDEM, which is the world's largest conference for Open Source and Free Software, annually held in February in Brussels. In the meantime, the official schedule of the Microkernel Developer Room got published: Saturday, February 5, 2022 https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/track/microkernel_and_component_based_os/ Among the packed schedule, the following talk is specifically about Genode: 11:50 AM "Genode meets the PinePhone" by Norman Feske https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/nfeske/ The talk will feature our latest developments related to the PinePhone, including a demonstration. The event is free for everyone interested. Just tune in! 3. The story of Genode's Browser Odyssey ---------------------------------------- We already mentioned the challenge of running the Chromium web browser engine on Genode as one of the major breakthroughs of the past year. But why do we think this such a great feat? To answer this question, we have put together a dedicated article presenting our motivation and the long-winded story of this development: https://genodians.org/nfeske/2022-01-27-browser-odyssey In the article, we share our methodology with porting such large beasts of software. It is garnished with several debugging war stories, and it highlights the flexibility of Genode with respect to the integration of multimedia features. About the newsletter -------------------- If you have friends or colleagues who might be interested in our projects, we would appreciate you to forward this email. If you received this newsletter as a forwarded email, you may subscribe to the newsletter here: https://genode-labs.com/newsletter In the case of receiving this newsletter unintended, you can cancel your subscription at any time by replying to this email with the subject set to "unsubscribe". Best regards -- Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske Genode Labs https://www.genode-labs.com/ · https://genode.org/ https://twitter.com/GenodeLabs · /ˈdʒiː.nəʊd/ Genode Labs GmbH · Amtsgericht Dresden · HRB 28424 · Sitz Dresden Geschäftsführer: Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske, Christian Helmuth
