As this week concludes I’d like to post an update on what I’ve been up to and what I’ll be working on next. After fixing a few kernel issues and looking into some others I’ve come to a point where I’ll gradually refocus back on some of the tasks I left open before mentally entering the kernel debugging land. In this blog post I’ll also try to describe some of what I did this week to hopefully make it a bit more accessible.
So what is going on right now in the time I spend on my Haiku contract? For the past two and a half weeks I’ve had my mind wrapped around various parts of the kernel. Things started out at BeGeistert and the coding sprint following it. The nice thing about the coding sprint is that you spend a lot of time with very knowledgeable people and can therefore tackle things that you would usually shy away from. In this case, Ingo Weinhold and I were seeing some random memory corruption problems and an apparent memory/pages leak. So we started investigating those by adding more debug functions into the relevant parts.
In some situations, for example when we are using linux, can be extremely annoying to reboot into Haiku every time we need something (for example when we have a ppp connection).
I’ve written this article and i decided to post it here, in the hope that will help users and developers to have the life a bit simple.
There’s a fast method to boot a physical Haiku partition using VirtualBox, it require only a few commands.
My commands refers to linux, anyway the operation is possibile under Windows (and presumably all supported platforms), changing the disk path. Remember also that you don’t have to set permissions under Windows.
I'm heading home from the BeGeistert event that just ended today.
For those who don't know, BeGeistert is the european meeting of all Haiku (and BeOS)
developpers and enthusiasts. This year, Haiku has seen its third alpha release, and
we feel that R1 shouldn't be too far.
So, what happened there ? Over the weekend we had multiple conferences. The first
one on saturday morning was a discussion on Haiku's release process and roadmap for the future.
We didn't have time to solve all the problems, but at least one important decision was taken :
after delaying the switch to git to after alpha3, then after gsoc, we finally decided it
was about time to actually flip the swith. This is scheduled for the 12th of November.
The GSoC Mentor Summit this year happened to be the weekend before BeGeistert, which allowed Matt Madia to make it to both events. This time Haiku had four mentors make the trip. Jérôme Deval flew in from Paris,
Philippe Saint-Pierre traveled in from Quebec, Matt joined us from New Jersey, and I drove down from just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Google allows two mentors per org, plus a third if the org participated in Google Code-In last year. Mentors who live nearby are allowed to sign up on a waiting list and if there's enough room Google allows them to come as well, so that's how we ended up with 4 this year. Matt and I stayed at the Domain hotel, while Jérôme and Philippe stayed at the Wild Palms. Google has a Friday night dinner at the Wild Palms so Matt and I walked over to meet up with Philippe and Jérôme, except that no one knew what Jérôme looked like. We were there for a few hours but didn't manage to find him on Friday night.
On Saturday morning we hopped on the Google buses and headed over to the Googleplex. We finally met up with Jérôme at breakfast. After breakfast we headed over to building 43 for the start of the unconference. There were several interesting sessions posted, including one hosted by Philippe on software patents. Over the two days we sometimes went to sessions together and other times split up. While looking for one to attend for the last session on Saturday we didn't find one that sounded interesting so we posted Haiku on one of the empty slots for a room that could hold 8 people. The four of us headed over and so we could talk about Haiku. We were joined by a couple others who were interested in hearing about what was new with Haiku, so we talked and answered their questions and showed off a few things.
Saturday night Urias joined in, having driven 3+ hours to meet up with us. On Sunday after breakfast we ventured over to the android statues for some pictures.
We later attended what has now become a yearly mentor summit tradition, the Open Source Operating System Session. This year's session featured about 25 mentors from at least 9 different OSes. We went around the room discussing what's new with each one in the last year or so and ways that we could help each other. There was at least one new comer, IluminOS which I think is where Open Solaris migrated to. Philippe's session on software patents was at the same time as the OS Summit, the notes from that session and most of the other sessions are posted on the mentor summit wiki:
GSoC Mentor Summit 2011 Session NotesIt was a fun weekend and was great to meet up with each other. Google was, as always a great host and we thank them for GSoC and the mentor summit.
As some of you know, I’ve started my contract work on Haiku pretty exactly one month ago. During that time I’ve been working on various things that I’d like to summarize in this post. In the future I plan on posting more but shorter entries, but since much has happened in this month this one is going to be a bit more elaborate.
When I first started working on the scheduler I didn’t make a big deal about it, but when I did mention it I was quite surprised at the amount of interest there was in what I was doing. So much so that it was suggested that I start blogging about it, so here I am! I would like to take this time to introduce myself as well as the work that I am doing on the scheduler.
UPDATE 10/19/2011! Older Radeon HD cards seem fully working minus HDMI. See below.
After several months of hard work (including some redesign of the driver) basic mode setting is working on a small number of Radeon HD cards after r42877. I am using the AMD AtomBIOS parser which executes binary functions on the Radeon HD card to do the real register hitting.
Limitations:
- No 2D acceleration - 2D acceleration hasn't been started yet. These cards are fast without it however.
- TV not working - I haven't put a lot of focus on TV just yet
- Later cards - Radeon HD 5xxx+ cards are still having issues
- DIG encoders - Later (r700?) Radeon cards can have DIG encoders. These are like digital encoders... but newer and not done yet.
Features:
As I'm returning from DC-2011 in the train I noticed that I didn't blog for quite some time, and never told you about things I've seen and done at various places this year. Let's fix this mistake ASAP.
Mike and Darkwyrm at the table
The weekend of September 9th, 2011 marked my third year in attendance at the Ohio LinuxFest (OLF). My friend, Amir, and I arrived in Columbus right around 8 PM that Friday night, and after getting our belongings put away at the Drury hotel, we decided to check out the “20th birthday of the Linux kernel” celebration at the Hyatt hotel. We didn’t really know all that many people there, but minutes after arriving, we got chatted up by some people, and I was naturally asked about Haiku right away due to me wearing a Haiku shirt. There were a couple more conversations like this with some other people we met, which was great, as I got to show those individuals Haiku in action the very next day. I also got to talk to some people I knew from Pittsburgh, like klaatu, as well as my friend Vance from our Linux Users’ Group, WPLUG. Seeing as I still didn’t have my Haiku demonstration machines set up the way I wanted them, Amir and I decided to head back to the hotel shortly later around 9 PM. On the way out, I saw Beth Lynn Eicher (Director of OLF and former Chair of WPULG) wearing her red fedora and I made sure to say hello, not only because she has always been supportive of Haiku and its presence at OLF, but because she has been a good friend over the years.
Back at the hotel I worked on getting the demo machines ready. Initially my plan was to run Haiku natively on my Lenovo Thinkpad X61 and then run Haiku in VirtualBox via Linux Mint 11 on my Lenovo Thinkpad X120e in order to show off the Guest Additions that were done as part of Google Summer of Code 2011 by Mike Smith. I did get that running just fine, except Haiku was running on it quite slowly in virtualization, given that the X120e isn’t exactly a powerhouse machine. I decided to scrap showing the VirtualBox Guest Additions on the X120e, and instead just ran Haiku off of a nano USB drive that I had imaged earlier that day. I set up both Haiku machines to basically have the same setup, where we could show off multimedia performance and Haiku-specific strengths. Assuming I have both machines around next year, I’ll likely try a different configuration, where I’ll run Haiku natively from the X120e and run it virtualized on the X61.
Showing a video and webpage
After being satisfied that the Haiku machines were ready, I finally ended up getting to sleep around 3:15 AM. My alarm went off a couple of hours later, and after getting my shower, I headed off to the Columbus Convention Center. I got the Haiku table set up relatively quickly and awaited attendees to stop by to visit the table. Before things were too far along, a gentleman who was doing security at the event stopped by and told me how he used Haiku on his older machine, and that he loved it. That was great to hear, and I figured it was always good to be on good terms with one of the individuals running security. Rob Ball (Sponsorship Chair) of OLF stopped by early on as well, and made sure that we had electricity and all of our other needs addressed. Right after he left, Beth Lynn Eicher stopped by and we talked a bit, which was cool as I didn’t get to talk to her much the night before.
