[GSoC 2014 : ARM Port] Final report

Hello everyone,
The coding period of Google Summer of Code 2014(as well as the program itself) ended on Monday August 18, 2014. Here’s an update on the status at the end of the program. I’ve been moving over the past week and thus the delay in the update.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on improving support for ARM. I added a jam target to automatically create a bootable MMC image and fix bugs in the haiku loader and also in the kernel. My original objective was to boot the kernel completely but I didn’t succeed in the attempt - it fails after sometime of booting into the kernel(an ASSERT fails in paging related routines). Few patches I’d submitted are yet to be merged(eg: #11131) to reach this failure. Currently, it seems that some of the latest changes prevent building again. #11144 tracks this issue. I’ve not investigated the issue yet so I am unsure what is going wrong.

I learnt many things by working on this project as well as had quite a few instances where I wasn’t sure if I was doing the right thing. Fortunately, several people were around to help out during those times - PulkoMandy, jessicah, kallisti5, revol, ithamar, Ingo and zhuowei. I can’t thank them enough since without them, I would be completely lost. Sadly, I probably won’t be able to continue work on this since I start work on my master thesis soon and working on the ARM port along with the thesis and coursework would be difficult. I’ll be able to judge better only in a few months time at least. Thanks to everyone who followed the weekly updates on the blog-o-sphere and supported the project! Till next time!