As many of you know, we are using FreeType as our font renderer. It is already able to produce very nice font renderings, but the quality of the rendering still seem to improve with every further version.
Until today, we were using FreeType in a wrong way, though. That didn’t affect the rendering quality, but let the app_server crash pretty regularly (note, it still does that, but for different reasons and even a tiny bit less often 8-)).
As I advertised yesterday, I had a short look at hyper threading today. Well, that short look was actually a bit longer than what I hoped for - and it even still doesn’t work.
While starting up the second logical processor is working almost fine - for some reason it needs some longer timeouts between the initialization commands - I get no interrupts anymore, when both processors are running. Have I said none?
Tomorrow, I’ll have a short look at implementing Hyper Threading support - not the full monty, but it would still be nice to have it start using the two logical processors in my system; after all, I bought this system with enabling Hyper Threading in Haiku in mind.
After that excursion, I will start looking at the app_server again. I had started to refactor the code some weeks ago, but got interrupted, and didn’t find the time to continue this effort.
I just booted into Haiku working on an SMP machine. Unfortunately, I am not really sure what change exactly triggered this - I’ve tried so much and all of a sudden it started to work, after I disabled setting up the APIC (the advanced programmable interrupt controller) to use ExtINT delivery mode - that shouldn’t tell you anything, I know, but it’s still remarkably that this code was originally disabled as well.
Even though I usually don’t work at the weekend, I had to, since I didn’t manage to work 8 hours on friday.
Unfortunately, I still haven’t got SMP to work yet. I’ve investigated the issue, and came to the simple conclusion that the APIC interrupts doesn’t reach their goal (it just took me some time to get there, and exlude all other possible faults). I can trigger such an interrupt manually, so the second CPU is setup correctly, but its APIC doesn’t seem to be.
It took a bit longer to get the dual machine up and running again - it has two 500 MHz PIIIs and the hard drive is a bit older as well, so it took about two hours to update the source repository and get it compiled.
While waiting for the machine to complete its task, I had the time to look into some other known issues of our code, and clean the signaling code a bit.
I’m done implementing sub transactions for now - I haven’t yet tested detaching sub transactions, but everything seems to work fine. Time will tell :-)
A complete Tracker build now dropped from 13.5 minutes to 5.4 minutes - that’s great, but BeOS R5 does the same job on this machine in around 2.5 minutes, so even while this is an improvement, we still have a long road ahead of us. I can only guess where we lose those 3 minutes for now, but I am sure we’ll find out well before R1.
A small update to the BFS incompatibility: I’ve now ported the original logging structure to the R5 version of BFS as well, so that the tools like bfs_shell can now successfully mount “dirty” volumes, too. I also found another bug in Be’s implementation, and needed to cut down the log entry array by one to make it work with larger transactions.
Now I am working on implementing sub transactions. If you have tried out Haiku and compiled some stuff or just redirected some shell output to a file, you undoubtedly are aware that this takes ages on the current system.
Turns out BFS logging code is not that intelligent - it uses block_runs in the log area, but it doesn’t make use of them. In other words: it only accepts block_runs with length 1 - which effectively kills the whole idea of using them. It’s now as space consuming as the single block number arrays I had before, but doesn’t share the binary search capability we had earlier.
While our code now could use block_runs how they should be used, I have disabled joining separate block_runs to make our BFS fully compatible to Be’s in this regard.
This morning, I went through analyzing the BFS log area structure. Turns out it’s very different from what I did for our BFS.
Our current log structure looks like this:
block 1 - n:
uint64 number of blocks
off_t[] array of block numbers
block n+1 - m:
real block data
While the one from BFS looks like this:
block 1:
uint32 number of runs
uint32 max. number of runs
