During the first few weeks of GSoC, I’ve gotten vboxsf, the shared folders module, mostly working, though I’m a bit behind where I’d like to be due to unexpected things repeatedly coming up both in physical-land and on my development setup. All supported functionality is working when accessed from the terminal - at this point I’m just optimizing and working on a bug where looking at a shared folder the wrong way in Tracker causes the kernel to panic.
The topic of implementing compositing in the app_server comes up once in a while. I have outlined my thoughts on the subject more than once, but these are burried in mailing list archives. Since I have just written another overview of how this could be approached, I thought I might better put this up as an article here, so I can point people to it in the future.
I am going to give an overview only. It is intended to help anyone along when reading the app_server code and piecing things together. These are direction that I think are guaranteed to work OK, and with the minimal amount of changes, but anyone taking up this task needs to figure out the actual implementation himself, of course. Here it goes...
As anticipated, I was able to do little more than set up my environment during the first stretch of GSOC and the last few weeks of school and my previous internship. I was able to find computer with a compatible network and graphics card, which should hopefully be faster than running Haiku on a virtual machine on my normal computer. I also successfully installed haikuporter, although I am having some trouble using it.
These weeks were prolific in terms of design and experiments but due to university commitments i am a bit late with the expected goals. At this point i have an implementation of BContact / BRawContact and i’m working to get the VCard translator functional. In these hours my focus is the communication part between the raw contacts and translators.
One of the latest design decisions was to make BRawContact own a translator that is suitable for writing the format specified by the user, otherwise it will use the default B_CONTACT_FORMAT (a flattened BMessage) for the final file.
On June 7, I turned in my dissertation and my semester ended. On June 10, I had my first final exam. Now it’s time to produce a progress report for Haiku. Almost miraculously, I’ve actually managed to squeeze some Haiku development time in and am making progress of a kind.
The most tangible progress is mostly in the form of debug messages and crashes into Kernel debug land, but I consider anything that I do which has a measurable effect to be progress.
During the first quarter, I defined an interface language to use for creating the bindings. I had to create my own for several reasons. Probably the biggest factor was the need to know whether the target language has the right to destroy an object. Most of the target languages has some kind of automatic garbage collection; the programmer never needs to worry about whether to delete an object to free up memory.
In my last blog post, I mentioned the following goals:
Define an interface definition language Define preliminary bindings for a minimal test programy Write a preliminary generator to create the bindings Write the minimal test program These have now been achieved, and the minimal test program (in Perl) runs. It shows a window with a button, and the button label changes when the button is clicked.
It still has problems, of course.
I was busy with finals throughout the Community Bonding period, which left me with little time to work on GSoC-related tasks. I still have 3 exams left with the last one being on June 7. That's when the fun starts. For now I'm merely playing with ZFS on FreeBSD on a virtual machine. I still need to make my way through at least the ZFS On-Disk Specification. Even though the information contained in this document is not strictly required for porting ZFS to Haiku, it's a useful read nonetheless.
During the community bonding period, i have researched around the project to prepare my work for the coding days that will follow. I also promised to talk with the other devs in the ml, it was not necessary in these days…i’m working with the help of Alex to a document describing the entire API in order to discuss it in the ml.
The first problem was to choose a Default Media Format for contact translators, my choice has been addressed to a flattened BMessage.
In the community bonding period I made some brief contacts with my two mentors and did some reading of specification for UVC devices as well as the header for the current USB kit. My mentors confirmed that the EHCI interface for isochronous transfers with USB devices is not working properly and does not have a good set of tests. Neither my camera nor my mentor’s camera are successfully engaged by Codycam at the moment.
