Road map for 2013

doc/road_map.txt

@@ -15,106 +15,164 @@ pushing the Genode technology to a certain direction, we are willing
 to revisit our plans.
 
 
-2012
+2013
 ####
 
-"Eating our own dog food"
-=========================
+Before detailing the work planned for 2013, let's have a look at the last
+year's road map. In 2012, we labeled our activities as "Eating our own dog
+food". Our goal was to bring Genode into a shape that makes it usable as
+working environment for conducting Genode development. Just to name a few
+achievements of 2012, there is the new ability to build Genode on Genode, SSH,
+lighttpd, the new file-system infrastructure, the new DDE linux and DDE OSS.
+But even though the puzzle pieces are nicely coming together, we are not quite
+there yet to realistically make the switch to Genode as development
+environment. Two major missing points are a solid UI concept that leverages
+Genode's unique architecture and a "real" file system.
 
-To emphasize our conviction in the maturity and flexibility of
-Genode, we dedicate the year 2012 to the transition of the framework
-from a toolkit for building special-purpose operating systems to a
-fully functional general-purpose OS. The ambitioned goal of the
-Genode developers is to switch to Genode as everyday OS environment
-for carrying out productive work. In addition to bringing forward
-Genode as general purpose OS, we plan to use it to serve the
-genode.org web site.
+Even though we missed our ambitious main goal for 2012, there is no cause for
+despair. There are many achievements in addition to our road-map items to be
+proud of. The most visible addition is the thorough support for ARM-based
+platforms reaching from versatile express, over freescale i.MX, to OMAP4.
+Another amazing development is the added base-hw platform that enables Genode
+to be executed without a 3rd-party kernel on a variety of ARM-based platforms.
+Furthermore, the largely revised support for the Linux base platform makes
+Genode fit to be used as component framework on Linux.
+
+So what is coming next?
+
+We see four major construction sites that we should address this year:
+framework infrastructure, self-hosting, tooling and optimizations, and hardware
+support.
 
 
-Ingredients
-===========
+Framework infrastructure
+========================
 
-As developers of low-level system software, we have very specific
-expectations from our everyday OS. While we can live happily without
-graphical effects and rich multimedia applications, an efficient
-Unix-like command-line interface, the presence of development tools,
-and system stability are crucial.
+The primary group of people Genode tries to cater well are developers
+and integrators of systems. Genode is meant as a tool box to empower
+those people to build real-world component-based system solutions. From
+this audience, we receive requests for improvements in the following areas:
 
-We identified the following features as fundamental to our computing
-needs:
+* Multi-processor support: On some base platforms, SMP support is
+  available but the framework still misses a holistic concept to
+  manage and configure the use of multiple CPUs.
 
-* VIM
-* Shell
-* Tool chain (coreutils, gcc, binutils, make, findutils, tar, Tcl,
-  expect)
-* Persistent file system
-* Block-device encryption
-* SSH client
-* RSync
-* Git client
-* GNUPG
-* Web browser (also used for email, don't need multi-media stuff)
-* PDF viewer
-* A way to run a just-compiled Genode sub system
-* Interactive Python shell (to be used as a calculator)
-* Screen lock
-* A fall-back virtual machine running Linux for carrying out sporadic
-  work with images (Gimp, Povray, ImageMagick, etc.) and LaTeX, and
-  for testing the Linux version of Genode
-* Tiled window manager (similar to the wonderful ion3)
-* IM client for Jabber
+* Improving scalability: On multi-core systems, and systems with a
+  non-uniform memory architecture (NUMA) in particular, we face scalability
+  challenges that we haven't thoroughly addresses so far. On NUMA systems,
+  memory locality is an important consideration. So the framework should
+  provide means to tailor the allocation of RAM for different subsystems.
+  Furthermore, core could be largely improved to process service requests and
+  page faults in a concurrent fashion.
 
-With those fundamentals in place, we will be ready to get started
-using the system. This will be the right time to address add-ons
-that make the devloper's life more efficient and enjoyable:
+* Storage: Block-device access is a general concern. Even though we
+  laid the foundations for Genode's storage infrastructure, several
+  pieces are still missing, in particular a "real" (non-FAT) file
+  system, block/file/directory caching, and I/O scheduling. Without
+  those pieces, there is no way to achieve the application performance
+  that we desire.
 
-* EMACS (for all those that cannot live with VIM)
-* Intel wireless driver
-* Media player (at least for playing music)
-* Thinkpad ACPI support, fan daemon
-* Qemu
-* Tuxpaint
-* High-performance graphics, e.g., via the Wayland display server
-* Native mail-user agent (e.g., mutt)
-* Additional command-line tools (e.g., mc)
+* Networking: The current TCP/IP performance using lwIP has room
+  for improvement. So I'd like to find a solution to bring TCP/IP
+  performance on Genode on par with Linux. Maybe this means to find
+  the bottlenecks in our lwIP port, or even going for another TCP/IP
+  stack?
 
-The work on enabling these functionalities on top of Genode will be
-scattered over the year. However, for each of the four releases in
-2012, we define a particular focus.
+* Qt5: Now that Qt5 is officially released, we should consider to
+  switch from Qt4 to Qt5.
+
+* Low-latency audio: The current audio_out-session interface was
+  our first shot into the direction of audio processing. To enable
+  use cases where streaming audio and sporadic sounds must be
+  accommodated at the same time, we need to revise our approach.
+
+* Cryptography
+  * Random numbers
+  * Block-device encryption
+
+Self-hosting
+============
+
+The second major topic is redeeming the promise stated for the past year
+- using Genode as a real-world OS. The following pieces are missing.
+
+* UI concept for pleasant working environment
+  * Tiled window manager
+  * Terminal improvements (e.g., scroll buffer)
+  * Noux improvements (e.g., signals)
+
+* Tools
+  * Git (work is already in progress)
+  * Mail user agent
+  * Instant-messaging software
+  * Support for 'make prepare' (e.g., SVN, wget, mawk)
+  * Support for run tool: expect, Qemu
+
+Tooling and optimization
+========================
+
+Now that Genode's work loads become ever more complex, we feel the
+drastically increased need to understand its inner behavior and detect
+possible black holes where the performance goes.
+
+When the system scenarios were rather small, printf-debugging was quite
+feasible. But now, with multiple instances of Noux running concurrently
+with several drivers, we need better tools for understanding, debugging,
+and tracing the system. In a component-based system like Genode, the
+creation of such tooling support of especially challenging because we
+need to walk on new grounds. But good tooling is key to direct our efforts
+spent with performance optimizations. The goal should be to ultimately debunk
+the slow performance of microkernel-based systems as a myth.
+
+Hardware support
+================
+
+The attractiveness of our framework corresponds to the degree of
+hardware support. Since we want to make Genode more attractive, we need
+to continue our efforts with creating custom drivers, porting drivers,
+and enabling platforms. The following points are considered as the most
+interesting ones for this year:
+
+* Intel architecture
+  * IOMMU support
+  * Improved virtualization support (Vancouver on NOVA)
+  * Intel wireless
+* ARM architecture
+  * Extending support for SoC platforms
+  * TrustZone
 
 
 Milestones
 ==========
 
-:February - Release 12.02:
-  * File and directory-service interfaces
-  * Offline Unix tools (vim, shell, tool chain)
-  * PDF viewer
+In the following, there is a rough schedule about the planned work. As always,
+it is not set in stone. If you are interested in a particular line of work,
+please get in touch.
 
-:May - Release 12.05:
-  * Revisiting the support for Linux drivers (USB, sound)
-  * Network-based Unix tools (e.g., ssh, Git, rsync), IM client
-  * Media player
+:February - Release 13.02:
+  * Low-latency audio support
+  * IOMMU support on NOVA
+  * First steps of user-interface concept
+  * Improved x86 virtualization support
 
-:July - Live CD 12.03:
-  * Presenting usage scenarios of Genode as development platform
+:May - Release 13.05:
+  * SMP support
+  * Qt5
+  * Cryptography
+  * Refined user-interface concept
 
-:August - Release 12.08:
-  * Tiled window manager and user-interface concept
-  * Intel wireless driver
-  * Persistent file system
-  * Hosting genode.org website on Genode
-  * Multi-processor support on NOVA, Pistachio, and Fiasco.OC
+:August - Release 13.08:
+  * TCP/IP optimization
+  * RPC tracing facility
+  * Real (non-FAT-based) file system
 
-:November - Release 12.11:
-  * Extended support for Lenovo Thinkpad
-  * Cryptography (block-device encryption, GNUPG)
-  * Additional tools (emacs, mc)
+:November - Release 13.11:
+  * Intel wireless
+  * MP scalability improvements
 
 
-Additional topics
-=================
-
-In addition to the main theme for 2012 described above, Genode will
-continue to improve its support for ARM-based platforms.
+Live system
+===========
 
+In addition to the milestones outlined above, we are planning to release
+a new live system in 2013.