The goal of this project is to create code for resizing a BFS volume in a safe manner, through the existing volume resizing interface. At first utilized with a command line tool, and toward the end of the summer hopefully integrated with DriveSetup if time allows.
During the community bonding period, I want to get my development environment set up, and gain some basic familiarity with writing to disk. To accomplish that, I’m going to write a small program that can read and write sectors to the hard drive.
My GSoC project is to implement a Network File System version 4 client. NFS since its early versions became one of the most popular way of sharing files among Unix-like (and not only) systems. The fourth version brings many changes to the protocol that both simplify implementation and make it more efficient. That includes better support of client side caching which can significantly improve performance. In addition to that neither mountd nor NLM needs to be used anymore since services they provide are now part of the protocol.
My name is Alex, I am a first year computer science student with a strong interest in operating systems and low-level software. My GSoC project this year is to begin a port of Haiku to the x86_64 architecture. Almost all modern x86 CPUs have 64-bit support, therefore a port of Haiku will allow it to take full advantage of these CPUs. The GSoC coding period is almost certainly too little time to finish a port of the whole OS, however my plan is to have ported at least the boot loader, kernel and some modules/drivers.
My Google Summer of Code project for this year is to provide a complete port of OpenJDK 7 to Haiku. Over the past few months I've been working on putting together a bootstrapping environment for building OpenJDK on Haiku, and porting the virtual machine and core libraries. Over the summer I hope to bring the port to a mostly-complete state by adding support for AWT, Java2d and jsound. This will allow Swing and AWT-based applications to run on Haiku. Here is an outline of my plans:
Community bonding period
- Continue to work on getting the virtual machine and core libraries self-hosting.
- Eradicate as many bugs as possible from the virtual machine and core libraries to give me a stable base to work from.
- Familiarise myself with Bryan Varner and Andrew Bachmann's AWT/Java2d code from their Java 1.4.2 port, and see what needs to be done to update it to the OpenJDK 7 codebase.
Summer
- Update the existing AWT/J2d port to the OpenJDK 7 codebase and implement the missing functionality.
- Write a jsound port using the Media and MIDI kits.
Future
- Get my work uploaded to the Haiku port project at OpenJDK to make it more official.
- Create a Haiku look & feel for Swing.
- Merge in the updates from the jdk7u project.
You can find my work and a quick attempt at build instructions on Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/hamishm/haiku-jdk. The entire source is split across multiple repositories; check my Bitbucket profile for the rest. In the coming weeks I also hope to release some binaries so interested parties can more easily test it out.
My gsoc2012 project is adding cpuidle support to haiku. As we all know, transistor power consumption is composed of dynamic and static ones. The former is due to charge/discharge of capacitance and other switching activity; the later is due to leakage and bias current. In the following section, I’d like to simply abstract power saving technology in nowadays cpu; powering saving technology in nowadays OS; what’s missing in haiku, IOW the reason why I want to work on it.
Yesterday I played a bit with qemu and the VT-d/IOMMU extension. The Vt-d extension present in many modern processors allows you to forward a PCI-device directly to your virtual machine so you can access it from the virtual machine as if it were a real device. This can be very helpful to develop drivers for PCI-devices without having to reboot the whole computer all the time.
For example in my PC I use my Intel-onboard graphic as my main graphics card but I also have a Radeon in the PCI-express slot so I tried to forward it to my Haiku VM and it was more or less successful ;). To do that under Linux you have to detach the card from its real driver (probably the radeon kernel module under linux) and give it to the pci-stub module (you might have to load it first). To get the PCI-IDs and all the other information use lspci.
As this was one of the smallest BeGeistert meetings, this report
will be quite short as well...
I arrived at the airport on Saturday morning at about 9:15 and
made it to the nice location at Düsseldorf's youth hostel at 10
o'clock. After weeks with temperatures up to 20 °C, the good weather
took a day off and I made the 10 minute walk from the station
"Luegplatz" to the hostel in a very fine drizzle and shivering 10 °C...
As part of my work at the University of Auckland (which is drawing to a close soon) I have been looking at Java on Haiku. There is already some support for Java on Haiku. By running installoptionalpackage DevelopmentJava you can get the JamVM java virtual machine, GNU Classpath (including gjar, gjavah and maybe some other utilities), and ecj (the Eclipse Java compiler, which is written in Java). This is enough to run and compile basic Java apps. For instance, the popular Java buildtool Ant can run on Haiku.
As was announced a little while ago, I recently got the opportunity to travel to Auckland, New Zealand to do some Computer Science research at the University of Auckland (UoA) with Christof Lutteroth and Gerald Weber (two professors here). Actually, it’s not so much ‘recently’ as it is ‘currently’, since I’m still here! Christof has been interested in Haiku for a while, and has already done some research using Haiku. Stack and Tile, for instance, started as a research project here, as did the BALMLayout layout class. Furthermore, I’m not the only Haiku-er here, as Clemens Zeidler is currently working on his PhD in CS under the supervision of Christof and Gerald.
I’m writing this to inform a broader audience of what was/is going on with my Haiku contract work.
