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Road map for 2014

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Genode News
===========
Road Map 2014 | 2014-01-17
##########################
| The updated road map outlines the major topics and schedule of the
| project for 2014.
In 2014, the development of Genode will be focused on the base-hw kernel
platform, a capability-based user interface, storage, and the scalability
of 3rd-party software support.
The updated road map provides a brief reflection of the last year's progress
before giving the rationale for the next steps the project will take. The
various topics include for example virtualization using ARM's virtualization
extensions, a novel user-interface, storage, VirtualBox on NOVA, and
3rd-party source-code package management.
[http://genode.org/about/road-map - Please refer to the official road-map for more details...]
FOSDEM 2014 | 2014-01-06
########################

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========
This page contains our preliminary plans for evolving Genode.
Progress in addition to this planning will very much depend on the
degree of community support the project will receive. The
[http:/about/challenges - Challenges] page collects some of
our ideas to advance Genode in various directions.
Herein, we lay out our plans for evolving Genode. Progress in addition to this
planning will very much depend on the degree of community support the project
will receive. The
[http:/about/challenges - Challenges] page collects some of our ideas to
advance Genode in various further directions.
The road map is not fixed. If there is commercial interest of
pushing the Genode technology to a certain direction, we are willing
to revisit our plans.
The road map is not fixed. If there is commercial interest of pushing the
Genode technology to a certain direction, we are willing to revisit our plans.
2013
Review of the past year
#######################
In 2013, we worked on four construction sites: Framework infrastructure,
self-hosting, tooling and optimization, and hardware support. When
reviewing the road map for 2013, it is great to see that we largely
lived up to our planning.
The framework infrastructure was enhanced with concepts for managing
CPUs on multi-processor systems and for dynamically balancing memory
resources, it received new audio and file-system capabilities, and, with
the addition of Qt5 and the lxIP stack, we could enable highly
sophisticated workloads natively on Genode.
On our endeavour of self-hosting Genode on Genode, we could eliminate
long-standing show stoppers for several base platforms. We were able to
improve them to the point where we can routinely execute Genode's tool
chain across several base platforms such as NOVA and Fiasco.OC as part
of our nightly automated tests. On the user-facing side, a new
command-line interface has seen the light of the day.
Two highlights when it comes to tooling were the new event tracing
facilities, and profound support for automated testing. Thanks to the
latter, we expose Genode to over 500 test runs including automated
performance benchmarks. By executing those tests each night, we have
become able to resolve regressions before they enter the master branch.
So the master branch remains always in a good shape.
As expected for an operating-system project, most of our work was spent
on hardware support. On x86, we added IOMMU support, and the
virtualization capabilities on NOVA have seen a major upgrade. On ARM,
we enabled or vastly enhanced the device drivers for Samsung Exynos 5,
Freescale i.MX, and Raspberry Pi. We also explored the possibilities of
combining Genode with ARM TrustZone.
Only two topics, namely Intel wireless and a new user interface concept
had been deferred. We decided to postpone the Intel wireless topic to
address gigabit networking instead. Even though the new user-interface
concept served as a strong motivation behind many improvements of the
base system such as dynamic reconfiguration and dynamic resource
balancing, the work on those fundamentals left little room to bring
forward the actual UI concept. Now that those pieces are in place, we
can go full steam ahead.
The most surprising topic that was not clearly laid out in our last
year's road map is the advancement of the base-hw platform. Started as a
mere experiment, it received so much love and attention that it
unexpectedly became able to host the whole universe of Genode's software
stack.
2014
####
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.
In 2014, we will put the emphasis on the base-hw kernel, 3rd-party software,
storage, and the user-facing side of Genode.
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.
The experience with base-hw in 2013 ignited our ambitions to develop this
kernel not just into a complete base platform for Genode, but also
to explore new grounds. To fully accommodate Genode, we will complement
base-hw with multi-processor support, kernel-protected capability-based
security, and real-time scheduling. Beyond supporting Genode's software
stack, we will explore the use of ARM's virtualization extensions
to turn base-hw into a microhypervisor, similar to NOVA but focusing on ARM.
So what is coming next?
With Genode becoming more and more flexible, the role of 3rd-party software in
both source-code and binary form grows. Even though Genode offers a pretty
convenient mechanism to automatically download and integrate 3rd-party source
codes, the burden to resolve inter-dependencies between such source packages is
still left to the user of the framework. Many new users stumble over
the installation of 3rd-party code as it is not obvious to see which packages
are required for a particular system scenario. To make Genode better
approachable and more convenient to use, we plan to consolidate the current
mechanisms into a solid source-code package management solution.
We see four major construction sites that we should address this year:
framework infrastructure, self-hosting, tooling and optimizations, and hardware
support.
The improved 3rd-party software support will hopefully allow us to realize
sophisticated and popular usage scenarios more easily. As security is one of
Genode's major benefits compared to commodity operating systems, we consider
supporting TOR, either as server, or client side, or even both. One
possibility would be to provide a ready-to-use live image containing a TOR
client and a configured browser, which would enable users to browse
anonymously.
Besides the use of ported 3rd-party software on top of Genode, we see clear
demand for hosting 3rd-party binary software, particularly virtualized OSes.
The Seoul VMM (on NOVA) and L4Linux (on Fiasco.OC) already allow for the use
of Linux guest OSes as Genode sub systems. However, both solutions fall short
in different ways. Whereas L4Linux requires the maintenance of a patched Linux
kernel, Seoul can execute unpatched Linux kernels but requires a fine-tuned
kernel configuration. Because we long for a product-quality virtualization
solution that works just out of the box with most existing guest OSes, we will
make VirtualBox available on Genode/NOVA.
Framework infrastructure
========================
The move to employing Genode for day-to-day computing requires reliable,
secure, and fast storage. Hence, we will build and optimize components that
operate on file-system and block level. This includes work on device drivers,
file-system stacks, caching mechanisms, block-level encryption, as well as
improved per-process virtual file systems.
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:
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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?
* 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
Finally, we plan to complement Genode with an entirely capability-based user
interface, which will present the user with a unique model of how to interact
with the system. With user interface, we actually refer to three different
things: System configuration (the user interface a system integrator has
to deal with), text-based user interface, and a graphical desktop environment.
We hope to cover those with one single holistic concept.
Milestones
==========
In the following, there is a rough schedule about the planned work. As always,
In the following, there is a rough schedule of the planned work. As usual,
it is not set in stone. If you are interested in a particular line of work,
please get in touch.
:February - Release 13.02:
* Low-latency audio support
* IOMMU support on NOVA
* First steps of user-interface concept
* Improved x86 virtualization support
:February - Release 14.02:
* First version of VirtualBox on NOVA
* Base-hw: multi-processor support
* Block cache
* Component composition tool kit
:May - Release 13.05:
* SMP support
* Qt5
* Cryptography
* Refined user-interface concept
:May - Release 14.05:
* Base-hw: real-time scheduling
* 3rd-party source-code package management
* Block-level encryption
:August - Release 13.08:
* TCP/IP optimization
* RPC tracing facility
* Real (non-FAT-based) file system
:August - Release 14.08:
* Desktop environment
* Base-hw: kernel-protected capability-based security
* TOR on Genode
:November - Release 13.11:
:November - Release 14.11:
* Base-hw: virtualization on ARM, support for Cortex-A7
* Intel wireless
* MP scalability improvements
* NOVA kernel resource management
Live system
===========
In addition to the milestones outlined above, we are planning to release
a new live system in 2013.