Haiku is a new open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful.

Fundraising 2012

Goal: $35,000
  $5,349

WHAT'S NEW IN HAIKU DEVELOPMENT

Back from Auckland

Blog post by yourpalal on Thu, 2012-05-03 16:51

With one big push the work I did on ALM (Auckland Layout Model) while I was at the University of Auckland is now in the main Haiku repo. In short, I’ve brought the BALMLayout up to standard with the other layouts in Haiku, and added some new features as well.

Work in progress on the xHCI driver

Blog post by korli on Tue, 2012-05-01 22:23
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I started to work on the xHCI driver in late 2011: I found the code provided during the Google Summer of Code 2011 was promising and didn't get its full exposure. Another reason was Haiku Inc. provided me with hardware I needed to mentor the xHCI project by Jian Jiang.

GSoC Introduction: BFS Partition Resizer

Blog post by ahenriksson on Mon, 2012-04-30 12:43
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The goal of this project is to create code for resizing a BFS volume in a safe manner, through the existing volume resizing interface. At first utilized with a command line tool, and toward the end of the summer hopefully integrated with DriveSetup if time allows.

During the community bonding period, I want to get my development environment set up, and gain some basic familiarity with writing to disk. To accomplish that, I'm going to write a small program that can read and write sectors to the hard drive.

I'm also going to read up on documentation and code, in order to get a clear picture of where to begin when I start the coding.

You can check out my submitted proposal at https://google-melange.appspot.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2012/... for a brief introduction of me, a technical overview and timeline.

GSoC Introduction: NFSv4 client

Blog post by Paweł Dziepak on Mon, 2012-04-30 02:04
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My GSoC project is to implement a Network File System version 4 client. NFS since its early versions became one of the most popular way of sharing files among Unix-like (and not only) systems. The fourth version brings many changes to the protocol that both simplify implementation and make it more efficient. That includes better support of client side caching which can significantly improve performance. In addition to that neither mountd nor NLM needs to be used anymore since services they provide are now part of the protocol.

Community Bonding Period

During the community bonding period I am going to get myself familiar with every detail of all RFC containing information on how does NFS protocol works. That includes specifications of Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) and External Data Representation (XDR) which are used by NFS as well as the specification of NFSv4 itself. I think it may be also a good idea to check how NFS clients are implemented in other operating systems in order to find some interesting solutions.

I also need to get myself familiar with the Haiku itself. Specifically, with the parts of the kernel the NFSv4 will work with. That includes, among others, file caching, notifications, network. Since disk based file systems behave in a different way than NFS there may be need to make some changes in these parts of the code, so I will have to know exactly how to do it.

Summer and later

When I am ready with all preparations and the coding starts I am going to, firstly, write NFSv4 client that just works. That will require proper implementation of RPCs and basic NFS requests. Then I will be able to start making it usable, i.e. add client side caching, notifications, support for file attributes.

After GSoC, when NFSv4 client will be ready I will want to add support for NFSv4.1 mostly because of its interesting extensions such as directory delegation, which can improve notifications support or pNFS, parallel access to a clustered server implementation.

GSoC Introduction: x86_64 port

Blog post by xyzzy on Sun, 2012-04-29 14:52
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My name is Alex, I am a first year computer science student with a strong interest in operating systems and low-level software. My GSoC project this year is to begin a port of Haiku to the x86_64 architecture. Almost all modern x86 CPUs have 64-bit support, therefore a port of Haiku will allow it to take full advantage of these CPUs. The GSoC coding period is almost certainly too little time to finish a port of the whole OS, however my plan is to have ported at least the boot loader, kernel and some modules/drivers.

Universities in the UK finish later than most US universities, I do not finish my exams until a couple of weeks into the GSoC coding period. Therefore, there is a limited amount of work I will be able to do during the community bonding period. However, while researching my project proposal I’ve got myself familiar with the Haiku codebase and also submitted patches to fix the GCC4 x86_64 toolchain, which have been committed. I will use time that I do have to continue to familiarise myself with the Haiku code and start thinking about some of the implementation details of my project.

During the coding period, I will first work on the boot loader. I intend to modify the existing x86 boot loader so that it is capable of loading both a 32-bit Haiku kernel and a 64-bit one. Once this is done, I will work on implementing the x86_64 architecture functionality in the kernel. Finally, I will port modules and drivers to the 64-bit kernel.

Should I have time, I will also begin work on porting userland. As I said, there may not be enough time to get that far, but even if I don’t, there’s some future work for me to do after GSoC.

GSoC Introduction: OpenJDK port

Blog post by hamish on Fri, 2012-04-27 16:38
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My Google Summer of Code project for this year is to provide a complete port of OpenJDK 7 to Haiku. Over the past few months I've been working on putting together a bootstrapping environment for building OpenJDK on Haiku, and porting the virtual machine and core libraries. Over the summer I hope to bring the port to a mostly-complete state by adding support for AWT, Java2d and jsound. This will allow Swing and AWT-based applications to run on Haiku. Here is an outline of my plans:

Community bonding period

  • Continue to work on getting the virtual machine and core libraries self-hosting.
  • Eradicate as many bugs as possible from the virtual machine and core libraries to give me a stable base to work from.
  • Familiarise myself with Bryan Varner and Andrew Bachmann's AWT/Java2d code from their Java 1.4.2 port, and see what needs to be done to update it to the OpenJDK 7 codebase.

Summer

  • Update the existing AWT/J2d port to the OpenJDK 7 codebase and implement the missing functionality.
  • Write a jsound port using the Media and MIDI kits.

Future

  • Get my work uploaded to the Haiku port project at OpenJDK to make it more official.
  • Create a Haiku look & feel for Swing.
  • Merge in the updates from the jdk7u project.
You can find my work and a quick attempt at build instructions on Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/hamishm/haiku-jdk. The entire source is split across multiple repositories; check my Bitbucket profile for the rest. In the coming weeks I also hope to release some binaries so interested parties can more easily test it out.

gsoc2012 cpuidle project introduction

Blog post by yongcong on Fri, 2012-04-27 16:04

My gsoc2012 project is adding cpuidle support to haiku. As we all know, transistor power consumption is composed of dynamic and static ones. The former is due to charge/discharge of capacitance and other switching activity; the later is due to leakage and bias current. In the following section, I'd like to simply abstract power saving technology in nowadays cpu; powering saving technology in nowadays OS; what's missing in haiku, IOW the reason why I want to work on it.

Power saving technology in CPU
Dynamic Frequency and Voltage Scaling
Change core frequency and the corresponding supply voltage on the fly. This technology can reduce both reduce the dynamic and static power consumption.

clock gating
stop clock distribution. This technology can reduce dynamic power consumption

power gating
With the improvement of manufacturing process, transistor feature size reduced significantly. Smaller transistors consumes less dynamic power due to lower voltage and gate capacitance. On the other hand, it consumes more static power due to leakage current rises s exponentially. One manufacturing technology -- the so called power gating can almost really cut off the transistors, so the leakage current and voltage is nearly zero. This technology can reduce static power consumption.

DFVS is used in the so called p-state. Clock gating and power gating is used in the so called C-states idle.

OS technology
Basically, two components are used: macro(suspend to ram or disk) and micro. The micro component consists of two components too:
cpufreq makes use of the DFVS technology in cpu
cpuidle makes use of the clock gating and power gating technology in cpu.

what's Haiku missing
Haiku can support pstate to some extent. However, since the DFVS is taken much less use than clock gating and power gating, and the leakage current is more obvious, the cpuidle is more and more important in nowadays OS.

What I will do
In my gsoc project, I'd like to implement the general cpuidle support and specific driver: intel idle driver for intel newer CPUs such as i3,i5,i7 etc. and acpi driver. Also one userspace tool is implemented to tell us the idle stages' statistics. I believe my project will benefit haiku in power efficiency and laptops' battery life.

During the bonding period, I'd like to dig into acpi spec and try to get the c-states information from ACPI _CST table and read documents about power saving from intel and AMD.

Last but not least, I'm glad work on this project under haiku's mentors guide.I can't wait to benchmark the power saving results after cpuidle is enabled on haiku;)

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