Since my three-quarter term report I’ve been working on adding audio input support to the jsound port and fixing various bugs in the JDK. Since the AWT/Java2d and jsound ports are now completed, my goals for the summer have been accomplished! The OpenJDK port is now in a fairly usable state, and community members have been using it to run some large scale Swing apps such as NetBeans and ThinkFree office.
The next thing I would like to do is merge my work in to the Haiku port repository at the OpenJDK project. From there I’d like to look into the possibility of acquiring access to the Java TCK, which will allow for comprehensive testing of the port. This will no doubt uncover many bugs and keep me busy for a while. Here are some other possible areas of expansion for the future:
Since three quarter term I've added NFS-level support for named attributes what means that virtually all important NFS version 4 feature are now implemented, as I described them in my blog posts during the coding period. What still needs to be done is to improve support of Haiku's extended attributes and a lot of bugfixing. There is also a room for performance improvement and several possibilities to organize code in a better way.
With the announcement of Ingo and Oliver’s contracts for package management, it is worthwhile to revisit how package management will function. When reading, keep in mind that this explanation will be condensed, simplified, and partially incomplete. Nonetheless, it will provide a general overview on how things will work.
I’ve recently been working on caching in NFSv4 client. It was essential in order to allow the client to be comfortably used. I can gladly say that the traffic generated by NFS client has been greatly reduced, thanks to metadata, directory, lookup and file caching. I’ve also implemented support for open delegations which, though not always available, allow the client to perform virtually all file operations without immediate server participation.
For this period, I have been working on getting resizing to work from within
Haiku, rather than just in bfs_shell. In its current state, the code works,
sometimes, if you don't stress it too much and write data to the partition while
resizing. On the bright side, recovery from various errors is working well :).
In terms of functionality, the only thing missing is the ability to grow full or
almost full file system. The problem with this is that we need to grow the
bitmap that tracks allocated blocks before we can actually make use of the new
blocks. This can be overcome with a little slyness, but it's a bit of work, and
adds some complexity.
Since midterm I have been working on the jsound port, which provides audio, MIDI input/output and the ability to control mixer volume and other parameters.
After getting my head around some of the media kit concepts the implementation has gone smoothly. I implemented audio output support first, as I guessed this would be the most used component. It works well. Then I implemented MIDI input and output support. This is untested so far because I don’t have any MIDI hardware. In the end I will probably end up constructing some dummy MIDI endpoints in another app for rudimentary testing. Audio input support is awaiting the availability of the SoundConsumer class, which might be included as a private API in libmedia, as the file cannot be included in OpenJDK because of licensing restrictions. Once this is in place I’ll get working on the audio input support.
I began to implement the acpi cpuidle driver so that the power saving feature can benefit all x86 platforms(In theory although). The acpi is more complicated than I thought. The main time is spent on implementing “_CST” evaluation and decoding.
First of all, to evaluate any acpi object/method needs acpi handle. Since haiku doesn’t export AcpiWalkSpace method of acpica, so after system booting, I can get the acpi processor handle. the only solution is using the device manager so that the acpi cpuidle driver can be loaded during boot. This requires cpuidle modification so that generic cpuidle module is loaded by low level idle driver. The modification is not done because it’s simple and I want to get “_CST” evaluation done firstly.
I have continued to make good progress since my midterm report. All the kernel functionality except for user debugging is implemented, and I have ported a basic set of drivers, including PCI, disk drivers, BFS and PS/2 input. For most drivers, porting is just a matter of fixing compiler warnings. For some, there are 64-bit issues which make porting more difficult. For example, the USB stack will require a bit more work as it currently assumes that addr_t is 32-bit everywhere.
I have also made some progress in porting userland to x86_64. I currently have libroot, libbe, bash, and most of the command line utilities ported. I have got an interactive bash shell running on top of consoled (which is usually used to run gdb on if app_server crashes).
Last week Olivier and I had the difficult task of handling the booth at RMLL and showing off Haiku in the land of gruyère, chocolate and banks.
