Over the community bonding period I've been researching the best approach to take for the AWT port, and over the past week or two I've been implementing a prototype.

AWT demands the implementation of a number of 'peers' for buttons, text boxes, etc. which have historically been implemented using the native widgets of the underlying platform. The time taken to implement and maintain these peers is quite large, especially considering that these AWT widgets have been superseded by Swing and are rarely used anymore.

An alternative implementation approach used by the Caciocavallo project involves providing native heavyweights for the windows and views and then calling on Swing to provide drawing and event handling for the various widgets. This eases the porting of AWT and reduces the amount of platform-specific code to maintain. This approach is also taken by the recent port of OpenJDK to Mac OS X.

Over the past week or two I've written a prototype implementation using the Caciocavallo Swing AWT peers. It's very incomplete thus far, but I've got drawing working pretty reliably, as well as some event handling including mouse input. Screenshot below the fold.

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.

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.

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.