For a bit of a change this month, the usual Activity Report is hereby combined with my Contract Report. (Thanks to PulkoMandy for all his hard work writing the activity reports most other months, and for all the work he put into this one before turning it over to me for its completion. Now I get to write about myself in the third person!)
This report covers hrev55769 to hrev55835.
For the first time, most of the work I did as part of this contract was not in the month’s activity report aside from a passing reference, as nearly all of it took place outside the main Haiku source tree. So, here I detail it; and thanks once again to the generous donations of readers like you (thank you!).
Happy new year!
Note: this report covers changes only to the Haiku main git repository. There are many other things
going on for Haiku outside that git repository. In recent big news, we have an X11 compatibility
layer, and a running experimental Wine port. However, I cannot cover everything in these reports.
Help welcome if you want to contribute to our website with news announcements for such items.
That being said, let’s see what’s going on in Haiku itself!
PulkoMandy has already written the activity report for this month, so now I am once again left to detail the work I have been doing thanks to the generous donations of readers like you (thank you!).
Hello there, it’s time for the monthly activity report!
This report covers hrev55609-hrev55687.
New architectures
Kallisti5 fixed some minor problems with the PowerPC port to keep it building and simplify it a bit.
Kallisti5 and waddlesplash also continued cleaning up the RISC-V sources and fixing various minor issues there.
David Karoly is making progress on the 32bit ARM port, using EFI as a boot method. The previous
attempts for an ARM port used the linux style booting, where the firmware bootloader (usually uboot)
only does the minimal hardware initialization, and then hands over complete control to the operating
system. The Linux kernel is designed to work this way, but in our case, we actually rely a bit more
on the firmware, to run our stage 2 bootloader which provides an user friendly boot menu.
Hello there, it’s time for the monthly activity report!
This report covers hrev55452-hrev55608.
Kernel
Waddlesplash made the kernel always build with gcc8, even on 32bit systems. It was built with gcc2
until now, but it was not possible to use BeOS drivers anymore since the introduction of SMAP and
other features, which led to slight changes in the driver ABI. No one complained, so there is no
reason to preserve BeOS driver compatibility further. This should result in performance improvements
for 32bit installations, as the new compiler is much better at optimizing code. And it will allow
kernel developers to use more modern C++ features.
I’ve been wanting to publicly comment on Lenovo’s statement on Linux support for a while, as there’s much to say about it, and my failing attempt at finding a suitable replacement for my venerable T510 gave me an excuse to document my love-hate relationship with Lenovo all at once.
This is of course my own personal views and ideas, and does not reflect the Haiku project’s position on the topic, nor that of Haiku, Inc. But I feel they deserve to be brought here due to history and the direct and indirect effect it might have had on the project, including previous failed attempts at commercial applications using it.
While Lenovo is still above many other manufacturers on some aspects, and on others domains, well, nobody does any better anyway, they purport to perpetuating the IBM legacy, so I think (sic) they should be held up to the standard they claim to follow. Yet the discussion about repair and documentation pertains to almost every vendor.
