Hello world!
This has been a busy week with activity on all fronts.
Hello world!
Localekit and ICU migration
Last week I wrote the report while I was debugging a deadlock in ICU 53.1. I spent some time debugging this and I found the issue. ICU calls native functions to handle some aspects of timezones (tzset, localtime, and a few others). However on Haiku we implement these functions using ICU. This didn’t work too well as ICU tried to lock a lock it was already holding during the initialization of timezone data. Fortunately the calls can easily be disabled in ICU, and that was enough to fix the issue.
Hello world!
So, one of the changes made last week (the XMLHTTPRequest timeout support) led to an API breakage in the network kit. This made WebKit crash on starting WebPositive, and I had to make an “emergency” release during the weekend to fix this. While you can enjoy the new shiny features and the bugfixes, you will also notice it is rather slow and uses a lot of CPU. This is a known issue related to the fixes with redrawing frames, which needed to remove some optimizations. I’ll try to reintroduce those in a way that doesn’t involve drawing problems.
Hello everyone!
This week most of my work went into improving our HTML5 support in WebKit. A lot of small issues and relatively simple features had piled up on my TODO list, and there weren’t too much new bug reports so I spent some time to fix those. Here is a quick review of the features I added support for this week.
Hello everyone!
As usual, after the 1.4.4 release there were some new bug reports for me to work on. So the first part of the week was spent investigating and fixing some of those.
- Several problems were fixed in the video code, which are leading to deadlocks and/or crashes of WebKit after a video is done playing.
- A problem with text not being drawn (seen for example on Trac) was fixed. This is apparently a new bug introduced on WebKit side, where small text with shadows ends up not being drawn at all. I'm not sure my fix is completely correct, but it seems to work.
Update: Jessica raised the funds she needs, thanks to everyone who supported her!
Just a quick note to mention that Jessica Hamilton is raising money to fund a trip to this year’s GSoC Reunion. She was one of our selected mentor delegates assigned to attend.
It turns out that the reimbursements from Google are not going to be enough to cover all of her travel costs, and she otherwise can’t afford to go.
Hello there!
Yesterday I released version 1.4.4 of HaikuWebKit. This version includes the latest fixes to the rendering code and should be completely useable again. There are still a few drawing issues but they shouldn’t prevent you to browse the web anymore.
Hello there,
This week most of my time was spent on debugging. My new machine is running fine, and now building WebKit takes a little more than an hour, which is much better than the 4 hours I was getting on the old laptop. With a 4 thread CPU machine some concurrency and locking issues became much easier to reproduce. This led to identifying and fixing a bug in our BSecureSocket class, which was not properly setting up SSL for thread-safe operation. I think this will fix most of the remaining memory corruption problems.
Hello world!
This week most of my time was spent on preparing the 1.4.3 release of HaikuWebkit. This fixes more bugs and removes the “tiled” rendering mode introduced in 1.4.0, which turned out to not work so well. Some old drawing issues will make a comeback, however, and I will need to dig into the app_server clipping code again to understnad what’s happening there and actually fix them.
Hello everyone,
The coding period of Google Summer of Code 2014(as well as the program itself) ended on Monday August 18, 2014. Here’s an update on the status at the end of the program. I’ve been moving over the past week and thus the delay in the update.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on improving support for ARM. I added a jam target to automatically create a bootable MMC image and fix bugs in the haiku loader and also in the kernel. My original objective was to boot the kernel completely but I didn’t succeed in the attempt - it fails after sometime of booting into the kernel(an ASSERT fails in paging related routines). Few patches I’d submitted are yet to be merged(eg: #11131) to reach this failure. Currently, it seems that some of the latest changes prevent building again. #11144 tracks this issue. I’ve not investigated the issue yet so I am unsure what is going wrong.
I learnt many things by working on this project as well as had quite a few instances where I wasn’t sure if I was doing the right thing. Fortunately, several people were around to help out during those times - PulkoMandy, jessicah, kallisti5, revol, ithamar, Ingo and zhuowei. I can’t thank them enough since without them, I would be completely lost. Sadly, I probably won’t be able to continue work on this since I start work on my master thesis soon and working on the ARM port along with the thesis and coursework would be difficult. I’ll be able to judge better only in a few months time at least. Thanks to everyone who followed the weekly updates on the blog-o-sphere and supported the project! Till next time!
