Hi there! We're back for monthly (or almost) reports! I was at the JDLL in
early april, and while preparing for that I didn't have time to write a report,
and no one else did it. So here we go with a 2 month report, prepare for something
a little longer than usual. This report covers hrev52945-hrev53094.
Code cleanups
mt fixed various places where -Werror=class-memaccess was breaking the build.
These are cases where we initialize a C++ object with memset, which is normally
not allowed. Usually this does not result in too much problems, but it could
bite us if we made the objects more complex later on.
Due to the awesome work by long-time developer waddlesplash, nightly images after hrev53079 have read/write NVMe support built-in.
What is NVMe?
For those not keeping up with the latest advances in tech, NVMe is a M.2 form-factor flash-based storage device which attaches
directly to the system’s PCI Express bus. These flash devices are present in modern desktops and laptops and offer transfer
speeds of several GiB/s.
These devices now show up in /dev/disk/nvme/ and are fully useable by Haiku.
Last month, I sat down and decided to at the very least attempt to fix our XHCI (USB 3 host controller) bus driver. Issues with it have been the most significant problem users have been facing, as most hardware made post-2012 has an XHCI chip as the system’s primary USB chip, and most hardware made post-2014 (or so) has exclusively an XHCI chip and no EHCI (USB 2.0) or prior chipsets (which we do support very well.)
Welcome to the activity report for February 2019. This month has been quite busy
for me with the annual visit to FOSDEM (read the report), and managing the application
process for both GSoC and Outreachy (Haiku has been accepted to both programs this year).
We are already seeing candidates applying to both GSoC and Outreachy, so expect
to read about new names in the reports in the coming months and during the summer!
Welcome to the second monthly report for 2019! PulkoMandy and a few others are representing Haiku at FOSDEM, so, I’m covering for him yet again. (Hooray, more writing about myself in the third person!)
This report covers hrev52707-hrev52827 (213 commits.)
Applications & Libraries
jackburton patched Terminal to use a float when computing font widths. This fixes the use of non-fixed-width fonts in at least some scenarios, though there are others unsolved as of yet.
Happy new year! It's 2019 and Haiku is still alive!
First of all, it's time to look at the stats for Haiku and Haikuports.
As you can see, the activity for haikuports keeps growing (there are now 2x more commits to haikuports than to Haiku),
and Haiku got slightly more commits in 2018, after two historically low activity years.
Let's hope the trend continues and we can reach the high levels of activity of 2008-2010 again someday.
Welcome to the last activity report in 2018!
I notice that I have not written any report since july. Thanks to the other
community members who took care of them during that period, as I was busy
moving (again) to a new flat, and then visiting the USA for the GSoC mentor
summit and germany for BeGeistert.
Anyway, this report covers hrev5263-hrev52615. We are past the beta release
now, so unsurprisingly, the activity is mostly focused on bugfixes, but there
are always some new things going on.
Over the last year, I have been slowly pushing patches upstream to Vagrant introducing native Haiku support. Vagrant is an open-source tool to build and maintain portable virtual development environments. Essentially, Vagrant lets you deploy and rapidly customize a Haiku virtual machine with programmatic scripts.
Since we now have a new stable release, I have prepared some updated R1/beta1 images to play with under an official Haiku, Inc. account.
Requirements
- A linux, OS X, or Windows machine.
- VirtualBox installed and functional.
- Vagrant installed.
Starting Haiku under the VirtualBox provider
The example below starts up a x86_64 Haiku VM.
Only slighty bigger than 2017's "Kernel Debugging Camp" in Toulouse, this year's regular BeGeistert 031 (on its last day affectionately mottoed "The Dirty One") was held from November 1st to 4th in Hamburg.
As in the past when BeGeistert was in Düsseldorf, we had a nice conference room in a Youth Hostel, just with a slighty less nice bedroom. Toiletts and showers on the floor instead of in every room...
This evening a standard operating system upgrade has once again turned fatal.
Our infrastructure still depends on a single bare metal server at Hetzner which
continues to be our downfall. This evening a (tested) OS upgrade failed resulting
in maui going MIA. I requested KVM access to attempt repair of maui after it was
missing for ~15 minutes, however we were stuck waiting almost 2 hours for the KVM
from Hetzner.
