My name is Vivek (Trac: vivek-roy, IRC: vivu). I have been selected for Google Summer of Code 2017 to work with Haiku on the project 3D Hardware Acceleration in Haiku.
The Mesa renderer in Haiku presently ventures into software rendering. Haiku uses software for rendering frame buffers and then writes them to the graphics hardware. The goal of my project is to port Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) Driver for i915, from the Linux kernel to Haiku with the help of DragonflyBSD’s Linux Compatibility layer, so that those drivers can be later extended to add OpenGL support (Mesa3D) for hardware accelerated 3D rendering.
A lot of activity on this side with no particular reason, with kallisti5 and
waddlesplash working on the network preferences and underlying stack, towards
support for VPNs and PPP connections.
The spring is comming, the GSoC applications closed just today, and it is time for a new monthly report!
This report covers hrevs 50989 to 51063
Drivers
tqh is working on improving wifi performance. He identified some sub-optimal
code in the FreeBSD compatibility layer which he replaced by much simpler and
faster functions that the compiler can actually inline. This improved performance
of all IO access to network devices, fixing some real time problems.
Let’s see what happened in Haiku this month. This report covers hrevs 50928 to
50988.
waddlsplash worked on enabling real subpixel rendering in Haiku. This used to be
protected by Microsoft patents, but they are all expired or will expire really
soon. So, it is time to start experimenting with this and getting ready for
enabling it.
waddlesplash also reworked the JSON API, and fixed several bugs found by the
“JSON Minefield” tests. This makes our parser more compatible with all kinds
of JSON data, and also easier to use.
HaikuPorter is a python tool that takes a so-called recipe that describes the dependencies of a software and how to download, build and package it.
The HaikuPorts Wiki has all the info to get started writing recipes. But it gets into too much detail if all you want is use HaikuPorter to build stuff with existing working recipes.
So, I just arrived from Brussels back home. One more FOSDEM done. As always it was action-packed, and I couldn’t clone myself enough times to see everything. The fact that we had the booth and that 3 out of the 4 talks I proposed were accepted probably didn’t help.
Luckily this time we were three to handle the half-booth, as both Olivier and Adrien made it with me, because yes, we shared the table with ReactOS this time, to increase the chances of being picked up.
Blog post by waddlesplash on Tue, 2017-02-07 09:56
Yesterday, The Lunduke Hour, hosted by Bryan Lunduke (perhaps most famous for his “Linux Sucks” presentations), had me on as a guest to talk about the state of Haiku and where we go from here:
Bryan’s been a longtime fan of Haiku (some of the old-timers might remember when he reviewed R1a3 on the Linux Action Show…), and it was a lot of fun to chat with him for an hour about what’s been going on over the past few years, and where things are headed.
So you’ve installed Haiku from a recently nightly (or sometime soon, the R1 beta) and you’re launching applications from the Deskbar menu (the blue ’leaf’ menu). Perfect, but there are a few more options to investigate if you want to quickly launch your favourite programs.
Hello, world! If you’re reading this message, that means you’re looking at the new Haiku website. This has been in the works for a long time, but at last it’s finally here.
