I’ve had some time to play around with Haiku R1A4.1 and got it working nicely in VirtualBox, running under Windows, and also on real hardware. Along the way I made a few notes (InstallingHaikuR1A4.html) on how to get it going. I’ll describe the significant things you need to know in the rest of this blog post.
A bit late, but finally I managed to process my recordings of the talks at BeGeistert 026 “Marathon”. The quality isn’t terrific, looks like the picture was much better last time at BG 024, when we apparently didn’t darken the room so much. Audio might be slightly better, as I have used compression and a bit of filtering following advice from Haikollegue Sean Collins.
I used Avidemux under Linux for de/muxing the audio track and encoding the final AVIs, and Audacity for processing the audio. The extensive video editing (j/k) was done with Clockwerk and WonderBrush under Haiku, which isn’t at all bad, just very unpolished…
The ARM keeps moving...
For people not watching the commit list closely, I’ve continued to find time to work on Haiku/ARM. So far, things look promising. No new screenshots of any kind though, but more investigation work done to get an idea of what I’m getting myself into. All in all, I’m actually quite pleased…
In my local repository (of which most is actually in the Haiku repository as well, bar some really nasty hacks that not even I dare to commit publicly) I’ve been able to get to the point where all content for a standard Haiku image is being built (the famous haiku-image target, for the devs reading this). Ofcourse, lots of architecture specific stuff is still stubbed out, but it means that at least there are no surprises lurking to get things to compile at least…
As you may recall during August, Ingo Weinhold
and Oliver Tappe were each accepted for two-month development contracts
relating to package management[1]. Originally, their start dates
were slated for sometime around November or December. Due to their
current contractual obligations with other employers, they will not
be able to begin as early as planned. The revised start date is now
around February or March.
As seen in Ingo's excellent presentation on Haiku's built-in debugging tools, our graphical debugger, while getting quite capable, is still missing a number of important features. As such, I made it my goal this week to try and resolve as many of those as I was able to.
The ARM is moving
After porting the basic VM code from X86 to our ARM port, it has been pretty much 2 years since I worked on it. Last weekend, BeGeistert 026, gave me a chance to work on it again, for a couple of days (nights?) in a row, and I tried to make the most of it.
Besides working on Haiku/ARM it was great to meet up with many of the people I already knew but had not seen for a long time, as well as finally meet the new people behind the names and posts I had followed over recent times.
Hi there !
This week was the BeGeistert coding sprint. I assume you already read the great report at IsComputerOn about the conferences for this week-end, so here’s just a summary of the work done durint the coding sprint.
ARM Port - Ithamar Adema, René Gollent, Adrien Destugues
Ithamar was holding the keyboard on this one. He's working on low-level Android stuff as his paid job, so he has a good understanding of the hardware and the Linux kernel that serves as a reference.
The ARM port was started as a Google Summer of Code project back in 2009. The project got the kernel compiling, and the bootloader working. Things more or less stayed there after that. However, with the recent release of the Raspberry Pi and some other cheap ARM-based hardware, there is interest for ARM again.
Some of you may know that for quite some time, on and off, I am working on a rewrite of WonderBrush, the graphics tool that comes bundled with Haiku releases. Since I have last demonstrated the prototype publically, I have occasionally found the time to work on it some more. I’ve ported over most brush tool related code from the original WonderBrush. And in the past weeks, I have specifically worked on a new text tool (written from scratch).
Hi,
as part of my PhD thesis at the Uni Auckland I would like to do a web survey about Stack & Tile.
Stack & Tile (S&T) is an extension of the window manager used in HAIKU. S&T allows the user to stack windows on top of one other or tile windows beside each other.
With the questionnaire we would like to gather some information about how and how often people are using S&T. Even if you never tried S&T before or you don’t know S&T at all, we have some general questions for you and we are interested in your feedback! If you don’t know S&T please take a look at the Haiku user guide *).
First of all, I apologize for the delay. I have now returned from my vacation,
had a few days to settle in and explain to my neighbours that I'm not dead (!).
Anyways, on to the interesting stuff.
On the surface, the status of things is mostly the same as in my last report,
with a few bugs less. I thought I had dedicated more than enough time for
bugfixing, but that turned out to not be the case. This is partly due to the
slower development cycle when testing natively (compile, copy driver to image,
boot virtual machine, test, repeat), and the bugs only showing up after doing
several resizes with other IO going on. All the bugs of this kind that I know
about have been eliminated.
To summarize the things I have accomplished during the summer:
- Resize support in BFS driver, save for vnode mapping and growing a full
file system.
- Getting the resizing "pipeline" from userspace to driver to a working
state (still needs some checking to verify that it's robust).
