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 Challenges page collects some of our ideas to advance Genode in various 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.

2010

Main goals

With the end of 2009, Genode has reached the functionality needed to suit a number of special-purpose applications. In particular, the combination of Genode's support for USB, networking, paravirtualized Linux, and Qt4 paves the way for a wealth of special-purpose usage scenarios. The main goal for 2010 is building upon these foundations towards Genode as a general-purpose operating system because we believe that the best way to accommodate as many special-purpose use-cases as possible is to address the general purpose. For traditional operating-system architectures, this would mean to trade generality as required for general-purpose workload against simplicity as desired for special-purpose solutions. With Genode, however, there is no need for such a compromise. The base mechanisms for dynamic general-purpose workload are already in place. By shaping Genode gradually into a general purpose OS, we will expand the software stack on top while retaining the simplicity of the base mechanisms.

Furthermore, we observed a number of new microkernel developments that caught our attention in 2009, most prominently new versions of OKL4 and its research counterpart seL4, the Barrelfish project, the NOVA hypervisor, and the Codezero kernel. We are eager to find possible synergies between those exciting projects and Genode.

Milestones