On the 8th September, I attended a local Unix user group called HUMBUG, at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
This was their Annual General Meeting, which was very much an informal gathering of 34 unix users and with the Haiku presence we had, we definitely made an impression; certainly more people know about Haiku than yesterday, and that’s gotta be a good thing.
Earlier that day when I was driving to the University, I got stuck behind this white hatchback, which had the license plate letters KDL. I thought, this was some sort of omen, however, I can announce there were no hiccups during the demos I gave.
During this summer I had the chance to improve myself, and work on the USB isochronous support of HAIKU. I wrote some code for every layer of the HAIKU USB stack: USBKit library, usb_raw driver, usb bus manager and most of all the uhci driver. I also spent/waisted some weeks with the usb_webcam media addon, but sadly with not success. Anyway here is what I did.
UHCI driver: Basically I added all the necessary code to handle isochronous transfer in both direction (in and out).
So after a few frustrating weeks of very little progress on my WebKit port, I have finally gotten JavaScriptCore running on Haiku!
During this summer I was working under my mentor Jerome Duval’s guidance. This is the first time I tried to be part of the GSOC program.
I started reading as many documents about HAIKU as I can find before I was accepted on 11th April. I checked out the haikus’s source and built it and tested it on qemu. I was shocked by its clean and user-friendly desktop. I started reading its source after 1st May. I was shocked again by its wonderful design and implementation, I think I have fall in love with it:). I started coding on 28th May. During June, I had 4 exams, so the time spent on my project limited. I should started coding earlier just as what I answered the question:“If there was one thing you wish you had known before getting started in Summer of Code, what would it be?”. I spent about 35 hours per week from 6th July when my summer begin on.
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post, here’s the summary for last week’s activity in Haiku-land.
This week saw the driver for AHCI SATA controllers begun in earnest, the beginnings of job control support in the shell (and associated kernel stuff), a Sudoku game added to the image, and more bugs squashed.
There was also a discussion on the development mailing list about “hybrid” images of Haiku, allowing both GCC 2 and GCC 4 compiled apps to work on the same system.
A couple of months ago there was a debate on the mailing list about the openness of the Haiku project. I made the point that there was a lot of information in the public domain - SVN commits logs, bug updates, and a multitidue of mailing lists - the problem was that activity on these fronts was not obvious to more casual Haiku-watchers. I should have kept my mouth shut, because I ended up agreeing to write some summaries of this activity! This is the first of what will hopefully be weekly updates. Feel free to leave comments and suggestions below.
I have been documenting my progress on porting the WebKit project to Haiku on the Haikuware site, but decided to also post information here. You may want to read my previous blog article about this port and also the information at the WebKit bounty on Haikuware. Please consider donating to a bounty.
Before I started work on this port I asked in the #webkit IRC channel what the mimimum version of GCC that was required to compile WebKit. The general consensus was 4.0. So what does that mean?
Whenever I was with Axel and saw Haiku running on his IBM ThinkPad T40p, I was almost convinced, that he must have forgotten to commit a rather effective patch, though he swore that that was not the case. I have never seen the app_server perform so well on any other machine.
My backpack turned out really heavy, because at the moment, I have no mobile computer. Luckily I have one of those "industry embedded" machines, as big as an external CD-ROM drive. But I still had to pack my 17" flat screen. The travelling by train was nice, although I almost got off at the wrong station in Basel. I mean, I did get off, but I got back in in time... turned out Ingo did it exactly as I before me. He, François and Michael Lotz were already there, and they waited at the train station to pick me up. They held up a paper with the Haiku logo, as if I wasn't going to recognize them... :-) One hour later, we picked up Axel, again with the help of the Haiku sign.
Haiku Admin Meeting 2007-07-23:
- A quick GSoC status was discussed.
- It was agreed that having Axel and Ingo working together in the same location to focus on many of the VM and stability issues was a successful endeavor:
It was proposed that this be done more often, with possible sponsorship from Haiku, Inc. to pay for costs whenever possible.
It was agreed that Axel and/or Ingo will be reimbursed for any expenses that were incurred.
This type of reimbursement support would only be reserved for certain situations deemed suitable by Haiku, Inc.- The state of Haiku after the recent work by Axel and Ingo was discussed:
It was observed that the system is very stable at this point, even more so than was anticipated.- The possibility of WalterCon cancellation is discussed:
Only 3 confirmed sign ups so far.
Most likely reason for low attendance is probably due to short notice.
Another likely reason mentioned is that most of the user/fan base is spread across so many countries.
Planning for next year is already under way, and the short notice and planning problem should be prevented next time around.
If only 3 people register, it's not worth running the event.
Even if canceled, Michael Phipps should probably still go to LinuxWorld to do the presentation as planned.- More discussion about bounties and raising funds took place:
It was mentioned that providing targets for raising funds will help people donate to specific causes.- More admin team changes:
Michael Pfeiffer and Waldemar Kornewald have stepped down.- It was recognized that "diver" has been extremely active on the QA side of things recently, and his efforts are appreciated.
That wraps it up for the July 23, 2007 meeting.I would like to remind readers that any official discussion about the decisions made by the Haiku Admins should be directed to the General Mailing List. Any mistakes in this summary may be posted in the comments if desired or you may use my contact page.
