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.
GSOC 2011 is over and I’ve had some time to cool off from last minute stress. A few awesome tools for haikuporter will be coming soon. I’m going to work on rounding off those tools. The builddrone project somewhat works but is not of a very high quality. The queen needs love with respect to databases and or data structure. I may revisit it later, but I’d love for someone with relevant experience to implement something better. Jenkins reporting and distributed uploading may make it into haikuporter along with gpg signing (According to GPG availability, last time I checked gpg doesn’t work on Haiku.). There are a few interesting peices of code I may cut off into packages for others to easily depend on (Bitbucket and Github commit post parsing anyone?)
As everyone has probably gathered from the first sentence of most of the other posts, GSoC 2011 is now over. I accomplished some of the goals I had for the last quarter, but was unable to get GCC2 support to work. The compiler is different enough to not work with the same options, and even after adding a GCC2 tool definition to kBuild I found that it was too old to compile some of the VirtualBox code. Various workarounds I tried for this proved unhelpful, so the additions will currently only compile and run on a GCC4 or GCC4 hybrid Haiku.
You probably know that i have not passed the GSoC final evaluation. Although i am a bit discouraged (it’s natural i think), as said from the begin, it’s not my intention to abandon my project. Money wasn’t my first motivation to work, and it will not be in any case.
It’s just a short post to tell you what is the state of my code, and about which i’m working on.
It was a rather overcast day in Brisbane, Australia: Home of the Fourth Annual Haiku Down Under Virtual Conference for Haiku Users and Developers. It was virtual, in the respect, that the event was streamed live over the Internet once again using the uStream service.
We accept (and regret) that this service requires Flash, but at present, we still haven’t found any other services that are capable of delivering the same features. One of these days, we hope to use a Haiku friendly service.
This year, HDU 2011 (#hdu2011) was hosted from one of the ITEE boardrooms at The University of Queensland where I, Phil Greenway (Sikosis) was joined once again by Mark Patterson (BeMark) and newcomer Daniel Devine.
