Hello all,
GSOC 2011 is over, and the SDL 1.3 for Haiku is over- for now.
I intend to continue working on the project, although I probably won’t start again for a while, as the recent errors have been frustrating and I need to relax a bit.
The almost-most-recent-version is available at https://bitbucket.org/antifinidictor/haiku-sdl-1.3/; I had some problems with my computer and haven’t been able to upload the most recent version yet, which just has some changes to which functions are static and which aren’t.
So far SDL 1.3 for Haiku has made significant progress. Video draws correctly both with and without opengl, audio appears to already work, and various tests provided in the SDL test suite seem to work. However, there are a few significant bugs I have come across.
The first error occurs when resizing the window. The application occasionally receives the illegal operation signal or a SEGFAULT. The illegal signal operations occurred when blitting from the backbuffer I allocated to the screenbuffer provided by BDirectWindow’s DirectConnected() function. Presumably this was caused by the window being resized in the middle of a draw operation, since this error only occurred after I moved blitting to a separate thread. Before this, blitting was done in the application thread, and caused a slowdown of SDL’s event handling by up to 1 second (moving around the mouse required redrawing the window). I received several suggestions to fix this error, including move the blit code back to the application thread, use mutexes, and use BBitmaps. I have since transferred drawing operations to a BBitmap object, which appears to have removed the illegal operation signal. However, resizing the window continuously will result in the occasional SEGFAULT. I only discovered this error today; I intend to investigate it further over the weekend. So far I have noted that the SEGFAULT occurs in different places on different runs, although I have not officially found a connecting pattern.
So far:
SDL 1.3 officially compiles.
Whether it works is another story.
I’ve created 7 patches so far, four of which were created in logical pairs, one of which was completely useless. The 7th patch (SDL-1-3_patch06.diff) was sent out to the haiku-gsoc mailing list today, and should allow the code to compile. Note that not all functionality is implemented in the video code.
I’ve also started working on creating a Google code project to host my repository; this will make it easier to follow my progress if I succeed. So far I have had trouble pushing my repository to the project site; it’s a lot of information, and takes about five hours. I’ve tried twice and it failed both times, although the failure may have been due to other things running; I’ll have to try again tonight.
As anticipated, I was able to do little more than set up my environment during the first stretch of GSOC and the last few weeks of school and my previous internship. I was able to find computer with a compatible network and graphics card, which should hopefully be faster than running Haiku on a virtual machine on my normal computer. I also successfully installed haikuporter, although I am having some trouble using it. I am also trying out an IRC account.
During Community Bonding period, I began the process of setting up my Haiku working environment. Initially I attempted to install Haiku on my machine using VirtualBox; while this ran successfully, I could not access the internet or USB devices from my virtual machine (and hence could load the SDL libraries into Haiku). I have since created a Haiku-USB drive which also loads, although my graphics hardware breaks down if I do not run Haiku in safe mode, and Haiku still does not recognize my ethernet connection. I have also tried connecting via Wifi, with similar results.
This summer, I will be delving into the Haiku implementation of SDL 1.2 and updating it to support SDL 1.3. Since the SDL 1.2 implementation had a number of bugs associated with it, it may be necessary to completely rewrite the implementation.
I currently hold an internship that ends with Spring Quarter in early June. My time up until June 10 will therefore be extremely limited, but I will do my best to make time to work on Haiku. I hope to spend the community bonding period getting to know the Haiku community and discussing the project with my mentor. I also hope to meet or talk with other GSoC developers, particularly the other seven people working on Haiku. Discussing the project with my mentor will help me develop the best strategy and perform initial setup. Meeting and talking with other developers will help me understand the operations of Haiku and how my project fits within the overall Haiku project.
