google

With the help of a generous donator, Haiku, Inc. has acquired a major share of Google, Inc. and is now in the process of reorganizing Google for a major focus shift that will allow for wide distribution of Haiku R1 to OEMs. Distribution contracts have been signed with major mobile phone makers for an unprecedented availability of Phone and Handheld Integrated System Haiku (PHISH).

Also, as of this year, the Summer Of Code project is now officially renamed Summer of Assembler Poetry (SoAP).

Haiku Inc. recently received from Google a check for $4,000 for its participation in the last Google Summer of Code 2007 program. This is ten percent of the total $40,000 that Google disbursed to sponsor the eight Haiku related projects alloted for GSoC 2007. We want to thank Google for giving us the opportunity to participate in the program for the first time this year, and hope they will consider us again for next year.

The Google Summer of Code is a program designed to sponsor students to work in open source projects during the three summer months. Open source software projects like Haiku apply to become mentoring organizations, and put forward projects that students from all over the world can apply for. The mentoring organizations provide mentors to guide the students throughout the program and to assist them in the successful completion of their project. For each successfully completed project, Google pays $4,500 to the student and $500 to the mentoring organization.

GSoC Mentor Summit photo. Can you find Stephan and Oliver?Haiku's application to the GSoC was accepted for the first time in 2007, and Google assigned us eight student slots, for Haiku projects covering areas as varied as the network stack, USB, Firewire, a package installer, a new scheduler and more (here is a summary of the results). Needless to say, we will be applying for GSoC 2008 next year as well, and plan to mobilize the community again as soon as Google announces the details of next year's program.

Finally, we also want to give special thanks to Axel Dörfler, Oliver Ruiz Dorantes, Jérôme Duval, Stephan Aßmus, Ryan Leavengood and François Revol, all of whom volunteered as mentors to make it possible for Haiku to have as many as eight students in our GSoC debut. Oliver, Ryan and Stephan were later invited to the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit held last October 6th at the Google Mountain View headquarters, where they proudly represented the Haiku project among many mentors from other open source projects.

2007 was our first year involved in the Google Summer of Code. Looking back on it, it is easy to say that it was a resounding success. We were able to handle 8 students. Work accomplished included a mostly-complete FireWire stack, major improvements in networking, and more. Click Read More for summaries of every student projects.

FireWire stack for Haiku

Student: JiSheng Zhang
Mentor: Jérôme Duval

JiSheng spent his summer porting the FreeBSD Firewire stack to Haiku. Currently the bus module (OHCI + firewire core), the userland interface and a userland are ported. Receiving DV to a file works (command line only). Mass storage support (with SBP) is still in progress. The code is committed in our repository (see 00README.haiku for more information).

Network preflet for Haiku

Student: Andre Garzia
Mentor: Stephan Aßmus

Andre has produced a first working version of the Network preflet with which each working interface can be configured. He currently continues to work on the preflet to implement more advanced features like support for different profiles. The code is committed in our repository (see here for more information).

Package (.pkg) File Installer

Student: Łukasz Zemczak
Mentor: Ryan Leavengood

Łukasz continued the work mentor Ryan Leavengood had started to reverse engineer the pkg file format originally designed for the BeOS SoftwareValet system. Many existing BeOS applications are distributed in this format. Łukasz then implemented a parser for that format and a GUI based installation program. In addition he designed a package registration system which allows for later uninstallation of packages. He consulted with the Haiku Creative Design Team in designing the simple but elegant GUIs used for the installer and uninstaller. He also made use of the Haiku GUI layout API to make the interfaces properly font sensitive.

Precaching Algorythm in Haiku

Student: Krishna Kishore Annapureddy
Mentor: François Revol

Krishna wrote code to do readahead on disk I/O. Code isn't yet ready for svn, but it showed some improvement on the latency of periodic read() calls by a factor of up to 3 from harddisk. Limited testing on CD-Roms showed improved playback experience.

USB isochronous streams

Student: Salvatore Benedetto (emitrax)
Mentor: Oliver Ruiz Dorantes

Salvatore started his work on the isochronous transfers right after knowing his acceptation into GSoC, despite started involving within the comunity before. His work has involved all levels of the USB Haiku architecture: The UHCI controller, the USB bus manager. In the current USBKit has added support for the isochronous transfers and to set alternate settings. To complete the bridge also the usb_raw driver needed modifications. As test case, he implemented a simple application which communicates a webcam retrieving buffers. The project was successful although some code still needs to be committed to the tree.

Create a thread scheduler with CPU affinity

Student: André Braga
Mentor: Axel Dörfler

André designed and implemented an O(1) scheduler for Haiku - the actual integration in the kernel is still missing, though. The scheduler so far delivers a perfectly fair distribution of the processor time to the running threads while respecting their different priority levels. CPU affinity is not yet completely outlined, but will follow the integration into the kernel which André will work on in the next weeks.

Network stack revamp: IPv6, ICMP, multicast, etc.

Student: Hugo Santos
Mentor: Axel Dörfler

Hugo started working on our networking stack way before the GSoC officially started, and showed an enormous pace and high quality of the work he did. That obviously motivated him even more, and he started to work on things not directly related to networking (like his slab allocator implementation), but this also brought us an early stage of a FreeBSD network driver compatibility layer. Later on, he unfortunately couldn't keep up with his performance: he moved to another country, and did not have a working internet connection from home which prevented most further work. He still has some stuff pending and intends to continue working on the IPv6 implementation for our stack in the upcoming weeks.

Implement ICMP error handling and propagation

Student: Ivo Vachkov
Mentor: Axel Dörfler

Unfortunately, Ivo could not spend as much time on the project as he originally intended; therefore, he didn't finish his assignment, and is our only student who did not receive our recommendation for his final payment. Ivo regrets his lack of time and fully supports our decision, though. He sent me what he did so far, and it seems to be a good start - I will try to work together with Hugo and integrate his work some time in the near future.

Congratulations to all involved and here's to next year!