Briefly, my goals for the three quarter term were: port libzfs, port the commandline tools zfs and zpool, and write a kernel module to communicate with userland tools via ioctl() calls on a /dev/zfs. Another goal was to make sure our port of ZFS passes all tests in ztest.
With the exception of a few missing routines, libzfs builds fine on Haiku. So does zpool. zfs requires some love, but nothing major remains to be done. In fact, with the exception of a few routines that I need to implement in libsolcompat (our Solaris compatibility library), the port builds almost perfectly on Haiku. But getting it to build is only half the battle ;)
So far SDL 1.3 for Haiku has made significant progress. Video draws correctly both with and without opengl, audio appears to already work, and various tests provided in the SDL test suite seem to work. However, there are a few significant bugs I have come across.
The first error occurs when resizing the window. The application occasionally receives the illegal operation signal or a SEGFAULT. The illegal signal operations occurred when blitting from the backbuffer I allocated to the screenbuffer provided by BDirectWindow’s DirectConnected() function. Presumably this was caused by the window being resized in the middle of a draw operation, since this error only occurred after I moved blitting to a separate thread. Before this, blitting was done in the application thread, and caused a slowdown of SDL’s event handling by up to 1 second (moving around the mouse required redrawing the window). I received several suggestions to fix this error, including move the blit code back to the application thread, use mutexes, and use BBitmaps. I have since transferred drawing operations to a BBitmap object, which appears to have removed the illegal operation signal. However, resizing the window continuously will result in the occasional SEGFAULT. I only discovered this error today; I intend to investigate it further over the weekend. So far I have noted that the SEGFAULT occurs in different places on different runs, although I have not officially found a connecting pattern.
New status report:
major feature dropped; bugs fixed;
did some screen research.
At the start of the third term, it was pointed out to me that Haiku does not actually support hardware 3D acceleration, and to add it would be a larger project than I have the time (or knowledge) for. Therefore, I’ve had to drop host-accelerated OpenGL from the planned features. I’m somewhat annoyed by this, but looking back it was probably a bit too ambitious anyway, and I’m not convinced I could have finished it in time.
Not so long ago, at the half way mark of the GSoc, I was optimistic that I was near to actually interpretting data from the camera in such a way as to produce images on screen. I was successfully grabbing payload data from the camera, the camera’s in-use light was on, things were looking good. Since that point, progress has been repeatedly stalled by strange and difficult to debug behaviour.
Once ag
ain, the idea that tracker should use single-window mode was raised as a trac ticket. This discussion was made multiple times on the mailing list, and each time the answer from the developper was no. However, users still seem to prefer the single window mode, and other OS are switching to it. Maybe we just need to explain how to efficiently use this mode, and why we think it’s better. I’ll try to do that in this blogpost, with my own point of view on it.
It’s been a while since I last wrote something here on Blog-O-Sphere. Probably most of you don’t remember me anymore - but I’m still around, still experimenting with things Haiku in my free time.
During the weekends, I’m working on enhancing a very old BeOS application long lost in time. While browsing the Haiku kit and application source tree, sometimes I stumble upon some new (at least for me) but also interesting small elements that Haiku added to the Haiku API during its development. I like to try these elements out. Most of these API additions might change or even disappear in the nearest future, since I understand their development process is not yet finished, but they’re interesting to know nevertheless.
I know some of these additions might be obvious to those up-to-date with the Haiku source code. But maybe some readers will find this at least a bit informative.
From my latest post, i had to do more work on the base classes, i realized that my implementation of BContactField was too inflexible for the use so my progresses were not fast as i hoped.
The main problem was to provide something that can fit the simplicity of the Person format (people files) and the complexity of VCard. The result was BContactField. Starting from a number of fields (defined in ContactDefs.h) the class provide some methods to access the field-type of a particular fields and give an interface able to manage properties and parameters as well. At the bottom there are some classes that implements BContactField, they will be used directly by the user, let me give some examples :
My midterm goal was porting libzpool -- which contains most of the ZFS code -- to Haiku. Another midterm goal was to get ztest -- the ZFS testing tool --- to run on Haiku. Being able to run ztest in a loop for an entire day means that about 80% of the ported code is working fine (though the remaining 20% is the most difficult part of the entire porting process). ztest is a userland test, so actual file system modules or disks are not involved in the testing procedure -- ztest creates block files in a temporary directory and treats them as disks.
I’m in the middle of my planned vacation in New Mexico. I recently wrote a new feature for haikuporter emulating the style of homebrew’s create command. (It makes as much of the bep file for you as can be automated.) I’ve written a haikuporter (or later pkgman) wrapper to handle the achievements. It works like git-achievements you alias over the command and check the switches/commands. I’ve moved over some code to redis, and have gotten their development branch to build on alpha3 (Stable used to work back a few revs.). If you have ideas for achievements please file them in the issues tracker
Alas the time of my contract with Haiku, Inc. is up. So besides giving some details about the query support and libsolv port which I've been working on since my last post, I'll also summarize where Haiku's package management stands now and what still needs to be done.
