I took the day off of work on Friday the 24th and made the three or so hour trip from Pittsburgh to Columbus. Upon arriving at the Columbus Convention Center, I met up with the Speaker Chair of Ohio LinuxFest, Vance Kochenderfer, and set up the table runner at the table that was designated to Haiku. After that, I headed back to the hotel to drop off all of my excess baggage, got some food, and then headed back to the Convention Center.
This year, the expo floor was open on Friday evening, so I decided to take advantage of that to show off Haiku on my Lenovo X120e and System76 Galago UltraPro. I got some people that were certainly interested, and had lots of worthwhile conversations from both existing Haiku users and dabblers, as well as people who were not familiar with Haiku at all. I did a quick interview with Michael Huff of MountainKernel.com (currently being built), and he was great to interact with. I haven't had time to check out this video of his yet, but I figure at the very least there is some video footage of me, even if the interview did not make the cut.
This year was my first participation in the Google Summer of Code. And despite having to fail my student very early, I still managed to have some fun working with Akshay on USB3 issues.
With UEFI making no progress during GSoC, it was time to seek out the support of some of my long-time kernel hacker friends. And with a couple days to go before leaving for the GSoC Reunion, one of them came through with phenomenal results. He had gotten the MMU and ELF loading issues mostly sorted out, and we were finally able to load and start the kernel!
Hello world!
As you probably know, I'm reporting from Düsseldorf this week, where the BeGeistert coding sprint is about to end.
I won't cover the events of the weekend as Humdinger has already written a complete report for it, including videos of all the talks. So let's instead dive into the coding sprint event, and see what we hacked on during the week
While I was unable to actually attend Begeistert this time around, I was nonetheless able to take some time off work to join in on the traditional during/post-BG code sprint. As per usual, this revolved around improving our integrated debugger.
After a nice short walk through the light drizzle of the slowly condensing mist that completely shrouded the top of Düsseldorf’s landmark Rhine Tower, I arrived pretty early at the Youth Hostel. Entering our conference room I was greeted by its single occupant: Matthias, who I haven’t seen at a BeGeistert for some years. We were chatting while I was setting up my gear and one by one more people entered our conference room. Most of them coming from breakfast; they already arrived the day before. I was glad to see most of the regular core developers did manage to come to BeGeistert after all!
Hello everyone!
This week is a bit special, as it closes the first year of my contract with Haiku. I wish to thank everyone for their support through donations, bug reports, comments on these articles, and general support for my work. I hope this will continue into next year.
This was again a rather busy week, but there was not much work on WebKit itself. I’ll keep the breakdown I used last week (haiku/haikuports/webkit) as it seems to work well.
Hello world!
This has been a busy week with activity on all fronts.
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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.
