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 2013

Goal: $35,000
  $10,476

WHAT'S NEW IN HAIKU DEVELOPMENT

The Haiku source is continually built for testing purposes. You can download and install these latest snapshots to check out the latest features and bugfixes.

Be aware though that they may be unstable. Additionally, Web+ and some other packages have to be installed separately.

If you're OK with that, you'll find further instructions at our Nightly image page.

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;)

Accepted Students

Five students to be mentored by Haiku in Google Summer of Code 2012!

For this year's Google Summer of Code™ program, we at Haiku have been allocated five students! In 2012, 406 mentoring organizatins applied and 4258 students submitted 6685 proposals. Haiku is proud to be one of the 180 accepted mentoring organizations, with five accepted students.

Over the years, Haiku's goals for Google Summer of Code have evolved. Originally the ability to evaluate the students' capabilities was lacking and the attention was simply on choosing projects that filled a need. Now, the emphasis is placed on choosing the best students, as they are more important than their short term code contributions. During the application process, those students instilled a sense of hope and confidence in Haiku's mentors that they will mature into full project contributors. In other words, this is our opportunity to grow and refine young, intelligent, and highly motivated students into people who will continue to develop Haiku in the years to come.

For the past three years, students applying to Haiku were (at first encouraged and later) required to submit a code contribution. By requiring potential students to submit a code contribution during the application period, Haiku's mentors achieve several things. First and foremost, it shows that each student possesses basic skills that many of us take for granted -- using a bug tracker and compiling Haiku's sources. More importantly, it provides our mentors with some insight into each individual student's motivation and abilities. This year a total of 17 patches were submitted during the application period. 13 of which were submitted by our top 5 selected students!

RealLife(TM)

News posted on Sun, 2012-04-22 22:09
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To be honest, this article is something I have been dreading. It's one of those situations, where you hope and pray that it gets better before you take action, but it hasn't.

Michael has landed onto some tough times. The injury from some weeks ago has healed well enough. However, RealLife™ has prevented him from focusing on Haiku. It involves his personal life outside of Haiku. That's all we know and that's all we need to know. With everything that has happened and will continue to play out over the next weeks, Michael has decided to cease the contract. In the future, he does plan to contribute to Haiku. For now though, he needs to take a step back.

First Bugfix Weekend

News posted on Wed, 2012-03-28 18:30

We'd like to invite every developer to our first Bugfix Weekend this weekend March 31st to April 1st. It's an idea recently brought up on the developer mailinglist that developers should regularly meet up virtually to solve bugs or enhancement tickets from our bugtracker together.

While it's a bit short notice, it fits nicely with the 25th BeGeistert meeting that is held on that same date in Düsseldorf. That way everyone can participate in the two day hackfest even if they can't make it there in person.
It's a nice opportunity for old and new developers to meet the rest of the gang and get more involved with Haiku development. Our Google Summer of Code students to be are especially invited to join, of course.

The Bugfix Weekend will be held on the Muscle server beshare.TyComSystems.com, accessed with BeShare (or JavaShare if you're not running Haiku). BeShare is a client for chatting and easily sharing files, which should be nice for quickly sharing some source files, pdfs or screenshots etc.
As alternative, there'll be a regular IRC channel #haiku-bugfixweekend at irc.freenode.net.

BeGeistert 025 "Silver" registration now open!

News posted on Tue, 2012-03-20 14:47

Late as always the registration for the 25th BeGeistert event is now open at last. Head over to www.begeistert.org if you want to take part in it.

The jubilee event is taking place at the youth hostel Düsseldorf as usual. Many of Haiku's core developers will attend, and discuss the future of Haiku among other things. It's a social event where Haiku developers and users come together to share their ideas, and experiences, even though there will also be workshops, and presentations for those interested. The complete program is still being worked, on though.

This time, there is no coding sprint, however, but to compensate for that a bit, the event includes the monday as well.

Thanks a lot to Charlie Clark and the Haiku Support Association e.V. for their tedious task of planning and organizing the events in all these years!