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.
Thanks in large part to the hard work by X512 and everyone developing on Haiku, our nightly RISCV64 images are now functional.
RISC-V marks Haiku’s first functional non-Intel/x86 port!
What is RISC-V? RISC-V is a modern, fully open CPU instruction set which can be implemented, customized, extended, and sold without royalties. Designs exist for a 32-bit, 64-bit, and even a 128-bit processor design.
You can emulate RISC-V in qemu, design your own CPU and synthesize it for an FPGA, or you can purchase a commercially built and designed computer with a RISC-V processor.
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.
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.
Hello there, it’s time for the monthly activity report!
This report covers hrev55343-hrev55451.
app_server PulkoMandy reworked the way the screen is taken out of DPMS power saving mode when app_server first starts. This should have no consequences on most hardware since the screen will normally already be up during the boot screen, but the way it was implemented led to some confusion in existing drivers, as we tried to turn the screen on before the driver had a chance to set a video mode on its own.
Hi there, let’s do another activity report! You may have noticed that there were a lot of news since the previous one, but here’s a recap in case you missed it: a new beta release, the celebration of the 20th birthday of the Haiku project, the end of Google Summer of Code (final evaluations are being filled in as I write this), and also news from the promotion team which was re-launched a few months ago and is working on various things (read their own report for more details).
