soc

Google Summer of Code Project: Alternate System Timers

Blog post by Dustin Howett on Sun, 2008-05-11 00:45
, , , ,

Hello, Everybody!
I'm Dustin, the student in the 2008 Summer of Code who is going to implement support for system timers other than the TSC in Haiku.

I've been actively tracking (and trying to involve myself in) Haiku's development for a few months now, but have been passively watching it since Be, Inc. went under and OpenBeOS sprang to life. In that time, I've gained a basic understanding of the Be/Haiku API, and of limited parts of the Haiku kernel.

Couple growing kernel knowledge with studying standards documents such as that for the HPET, and I believe I can finish this, or get a very appreciable start on it, over the summer, and plan to stick around long afterwards.

I can be found in #haiku on Freenode, my nickname is DHowett.

Thanks very much,
Dustin Howett

Google Summer of Code: Zeroconf!

Blog post by Alex Roman on Wed, 2008-04-23 18:13

This summer I'll be attempting to enable Zeroconf support in Haiku.

For those of you who may not be aware, Zeroconf enables Zero Configuration Networking, and it is aimed at simplifying the creation of small networks: no DHCP server, no pre-determined IP addresses, no need to know what host name your printer is on! How is this achieved? There are three components to it:

  1. Addressing: handled by IPv4 Link Local Addressing
  2. Naming: handled by multicast DNS
  3. Service Discovery: also handled by multicast DNS

This project will have two main components:

  1. Implement IPv4 Link Local Addressing
  2. Port and integrate Apple's mDNSResponder (open source, under Apache 2.0 License, public CVS server available)

Right now I'm considering buying the Zeroconf book written by one of the main authors of Zeroconf, Stuart Cheshire. However, Google may issue us O'Reilly Safari accounts where the book would most likely be available for viewing online... If nothing happens within a month or so, I'll just buy the book. From the reviews it seems like it's a good reference for both users and developers.

That is it for now... Until next time!

Adding isochronous support to USBKit and usb_raw

Blog post by emitrax on Tue, 2007-07-03 12:36
, , ,

Just to keep those of you interested updated, after discussing it with both my mentor and Michael Lotz, and after a very quick chat with Francois Revol, I am going to add isochronous support to both the USBKit and usb_raw driver. Meanwhile Francois, if time is on his side, should add isochronous support to his user space quickcam driver (see src/add-ons/media/media-add-ons/usb_webcam/). This way I can test my previous patches and perhaps everyone can start using his logitech quickcam with Haiku by using codycam. I don't know though for sure, what product id are supported.

UHCI isochronous support added

Blog post by emitrax on Tue, 2007-06-26 22:21
, ,

For those of you who are not following the haiku-commit mailing list, I've added the isochronous support to the UHCI driver. I'm working on a quickcam driver to test the code, but if someone of you out there, already have some very simply driver, that needs isochronous support, please contact me and help me with the testing.

The sooner I'm done with the testing, the sooner I'll move on to the OHCI driver. ;-)

Coding Style

Blog post by emitrax on Wed, 2007-05-30 11:13
,

As many of you know, I've started working even before the SoC started officially. I've already sent two patches to both my mentor (Oliver R. Dorantes) and Michael Lotz for review. One of them has already been commited by mmu_man (thanks). The second one is under review. With this latest one, the usb stack manager should be complete, as the QueueIsochronous method has been implemented, along with the CalculateBandwidth. My next move is to implement the UHCI isochronous method. Once I've done that, testing can be made. As for now, there seem to be a lack of drivers with which I can test the code. Oliver has offered himself to write some simple bluetooth driver just to test the code. Isochronous UHCI Tester are obviously welcome.

Packages and file collisions

Blog post by Sil2100 on Thu, 2007-05-10 18:29
, ,

Finally back with a proper development environment.

Seizing the opportunity of having some free time, I finished implementing the user interface and prepared everything for package file parsing. Since I have yet to analyze the .pkg format throughout, I'd rather have everything prepared for this to come. From what I see from the materials sent by Ryan, the format itself doesn't seem to be as complicated, but there are still quite some unknowns. I will have to do some tests on a BeOS platform to see how a few other things work. For instance - unknown various bytes between the package description and the package author and name. Probably unessential though...
I will look into this more as soon as possible.

Popular Network Preferences applications and comments.

Blog post by soapdog on Sun, 2007-05-06 20:56
, , ,

The idea today is to compare and comment on popular network preferences apps. I'll pick Mac OS X, Windows, Zeta and Linux and comment on what we can learn from each and think about how can we design a successful network preferences application for Haiku. I will not focus on the eye candy or widgets, the focus is on the user experience and features.

Lots of shots of different OSes and some opinions by yours truly.

Syndicate content