Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

Blog post by kallisti5 on Wed, 2014-06-11 19:09
The Mozilla Foundation has generously donated 15 gently used Intel Mac Minis to Haiku, Inc. to be used as infrastructure, development, and build systems.

These systems are planned to be deployed as updated buildbot slaves, package builders, and used to better support Intel Mac Mini hardware.

Comments

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by puckipedia - 2014-06-11 19:07

Thanks to geist for retrieving them, of course!

Still, great news! :D

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by jua - 2014-06-11 19:18

Thank you, Mozilla!

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by the_webers_inc - 2014-06-11 19:35

Very Nice! How old are they?

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by kallisti5 - 2014-06-11 19:56
3-4 years old I think.

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by DioGen - 2014-06-11 23:29

Woah, maybe it's time for a modern Firefox port? Anyone interested?

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by niadh - 2014-06-12 13:22

I'd certainly be interested in this, I once tried to get a Firefox port going, but there's a lot of prerequisites. I've always wanted to get into Firefox development so perhaps this is the push I need, does anyone else feel a Firefox port is a good idea?

If so, I'll begin the research and post in the forums anything I've managed to make progress with. I would need some help and support though, C++ isn't a language I'm overly familiar with but I am a developer so I should be able to pick it up.

Niadh.

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by humdinger - 2014-06-12 16:14

Hi!

I don't see any connection of a Firefox port to Mozilla donating some of their old test machines to Haiku. If Canonical had to get rid of theirs, would anyone want to port Unity etc.? :)

Anyway, a Firefox port would be much appreciated, just like any other major software on Haiku. But given the huge amount of work, to do that, I wonder if your efforts wouldn't be more fruitfully spent by helping to improve WebPositive. It took years to get it into it's current state, including months of full time contracts. It's still lacking many things like password management, a plug-in infrastructure, caching, not to mention a thousand other bug-fixes and enhancements.
Instead of starting with a Firefox port that may or may not go anywhere, and would definately take a very long time to catch up with WebPositive, I'd much rather see a few people converging on Web+; taking the opportunity while PulkoMandy is still deeply involved, to use his knowledge and guidance to get up to speed with the (rather huge) code base.

But, of course, I understand this is open source and everyone is welcome to take on the project she likes! So, whatever you do, go ahead and enrich Haiku's software environment. :)

Regards,
Humdinger

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by niadh - 2014-06-13 10:17

I have thought about helping the WebPositive port, but most of my work day is spent in FireFox, I even have the FFOS handsets and regularly build web apps targeting FireFox.

Though I do have to concede that you are right and that it is better to have one good browser that two unfinished ones, I'm just rather passionate about Firefox, feel free to call me slightly biased, it's quite deserved. I am however not so biased that I don't change my opinion based on new information and reasonable arguments.

I'll contact PulkoMandy and see if there's anything I can bring to the table.

niadh

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by Rox - 2014-06-14 15:09

I've been advocating for a port of a 'modern' browser like Firefox and Chromium, mainly due to the speed with which these browsers develop these days and how little resources Haiku has at it's disposal.

Still, given the great effort put in to WebPositive by PulkoMandy and the progress made, I'm leaning towards WebPositive these days. Obviously a Haiku native web browser is the best solution, as long as it can provide the functionality/features most users would expect from a web browser today, this is where I had my doubts (again given the fast development pace of browsers today, with huge developer teams at their disposal), but now I'm starting to believe that the WebPositive project could deliver this with (hopefully) continued funding.

Oh and nice gift from Mozilla.

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by Paspie - 2014-06-18 20:27

For R1 yes, it would be useful. However, right now I think WebPositive development is more important.

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by ModeenF - 2014-06-12 06:55
Nice.. What spec do they have? It looks like it's little bigger than the NUC I bought for 1500 KR (about $150) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Mini

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by humdinger - 2014-06-12 07:58

Hi!

Great addition to Haiku's buildfarm. Thanks everyone working on making it possible!
From this Mozilla blog post, those should be rev.3 from early 2010, so I guess they'are those from the last column of the first table on that wikipedia page ("Macmini3,1").

Cool stuff. Maybe continuous integration is now feasible?

Regards,
Humdinger

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by codewrangler - 2014-06-12 13:26

Wow! That's awesome.

Haiku runs super fast under emulation on my 6 year old MBP computer (2008), so a 2010 Mac Mini running Haiku native, must be super duper fast.

Thanks to Mozilla for the hand me downs! :-)

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by Zaranthos - 2014-06-12 18:03

That's pretty cool. They'll come in handy I'm sure.

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by cb88 - 2014-06-13 01:33

Rust and a Servo port would make more sense... since Servo also uses the Webkit embedding API... it might be more or less a drop in replacement for Webkit in web+ someday....

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by The123king - 2014-06-13 09:48

They won't be running Haiku

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by The123king - 2014-06-13 09:48

They won't be running Haiku

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by arougthopher - 2014-06-16 19:11

IIRC, there were some third party libraries introduced to Firefox around v3 (Cairo maybe?) that needed to be ported first. The hardest thing with Firefox/Mozilla is the threading model used by it and making that work with the BApplication model. There was a "hack" that used to allow firefox/mozilla to work, and it was usable, but much slower than other platforms.

Granted, this in on me remembmering how it all worked 10+ years ago :-)

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by Rox - 2014-06-17 02:06

I'm not sure but I believe that the Cairo dependency is part of the GTK2 dependency (as in GTK2 depends on Cairo).

I first expected that the new Australis interface for Firefox and the new Aura interface for Chromium would fully replace GTK in those applications but it's still a dependency so it seems that it is still used for the final drawing, as the equivalent of the native toolkits of Windows and OSX which do the final drawing there.

The problems you describe with effectively applying 'foreign' threading models with BApplication give a strong reason for pursuing a native browser like WebPositive, assuming of course that WebKit won't cause as much issues in terms of threading.

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by PulkoMandy - 2014-06-17 06:12
WebKit also has a similar single-threaded design. But as you can see in Web+, we can still get this running with reasonable performance. In the case of WebKit, everything runs in the BApplication thread, including drawing, which is done to offscreen bitmaps (in a standard BApplication the drawing would be done in BWindow threads). We then send the rendered bitmaps to the window thread for displaying.

Knowing this, it may be better to run the rendering for each page in a separate process. This is what Chromium does, and WebKit also has support for it. It would work the same (because sharing the memory needed for a bitmap on Haiku is easy, and the inputs can be forwarded to another app as BMessages just as easily), but it would allow to run a separate WebKit for each tab in the browser, so if one of them evver crashes or freezes, other tabs would keep running.

As for Cairo, the problem with earlier porting attempts was that they tried to plug it to the BeAPI by writing a new drawing backend. It would be much easier to use the existing "software rendering" backend from Cairo, and put the resulting image in a BBitmap for rendering. This is a lot less code to write and debug.

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by fano - 2014-06-17 07:54

It is beautiful to see great companies as Google and Mozilla donate money or hardware to this project: give the sensation that they trust you; that the work done is indeed useful!

The Mac Mini have the UEFI Bios, right? I can hope these Mac Mini will speed up the UEFI Haiku support? My Sony VAIO has a similar BIOS and so doesn't boot Haiku now...

By the way I see this as an "invitation" to port Firefox in Haiku, in any case it would a good gesture to show that after their donation now Firefox runs in Haiku.

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by The French Rat - 2014-06-23 08:48

If it gets approved, can I help?

EDIT: By which I mean the Firefox port to Haiku.

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by PulkoMandy - 2014-06-24 05:44
Who should approve it? This is open source software, grab the Firefox sourcecode, try to compile it on Haiku and see what happens!

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by Dane - 2014-07-12 12:17

Thanks Mozilla, and to the Haikoozers who worked this out with them!

Agree with those saying to focus on Web+. Firefox would be a massive undertaking (which has been tried before for BeOS/Haiku with limited success) and would just would be a distraction at a time when programming resources need to be laser-focused.

Question on the donated machines. I think there are some of our major coders in Europe who need real hardware to develop on (presently using virtual machines). Would a few of these be useful to them?

Re: Haiku receives donation from Mozilla Foundation

by loll - 2014-08-22 00:21

I compiled 9 years ago Firefox 1.0 for first Zeta releases. I think that 2.0.0.8 was the last version buildable with gcc 2.9.3 (thanks to Doug “tigerdog” Sherlton). After, many components as cairo can not compile w/o gcc 3 :-/

souvenirs souvenirs...