Genode OS Gets An Ambitious 2012 Roadmap

Genode OS, one of the interesting non-Linux-based operating systems that is built on a unique framework architecture and is striving to make a general purpose OS, has shared a new project road-map.

The main point from Genode's new project road-map is, "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." This is rather ambitious but will be interesting to see if they can pull it off.

Their goal for February with the Genode 12.02 release is PDF viewing support, offline Unix tools, abd file and directoy-service interfaces. By May they then hope to progress to looking at porting support for Linux drivers such as for sound cards and USB devices. That's also the month they hope to have persistent file-system support and an IM client and tools like ssh and Git. In August is when they hope to already move onto having a tiled window manager, the Intel wireless driver, a media player, and multi-processor support for several platforms.

By the end of the year is when they hope to have cryptography, extended support for Lenovo ThinkPads, and additional tools ported.

This is quite an ambitious one-year road-map in moving so quickly from simply having a PDF viewer to then having Linux device driver support and many other critical features, but it will be interesting to see if they can pull it off and manage to make Genode OS a viable OS option at some point in the future.

The road-map details in full can be found on Genode.org. The next LiveCD OS release the project aims for is in March.