My GSoC project is to implement a Network File System version 4 client. NFS since its early versions became one of the most popular way of sharing files among Unix-like (and not only) systems. The fourth version brings many changes to the protocol that both simplify implementation and make it more efficient. That includes better support of client side caching which can significantly improve performance. In addition to that neither mountd nor NLM needs to be used anymore since services they provide are now part of the protocol.
My name is Alex, I am a first year computer science student with a strong interest in operating systems and low-level software. My GSoC project this year is to begin a port of Haiku to the x86_64 architecture. Almost all modern x86 CPUs have 64-bit support, therefore a port of Haiku will allow it to take full advantage of these CPUs. The GSoC coding period is almost certainly too little time to finish a port of the whole OS, however my plan is to have ported at least the boot loader, kernel and some modules/drivers.
My Google Summer of Code project for this year is to provide a complete port of OpenJDK 7 to Haiku. Over the past few months I've been working on putting together a bootstrapping environment for building OpenJDK on Haiku, and porting the virtual machine and core libraries. Over the summer I hope to bring the port to a mostly-complete state by adding support for AWT, Java2d and jsound. This will allow Swing and AWT-based applications to run on Haiku.
My gsoc2012 project is adding cpuidle support to haiku. As we all know, transistor power consumption is composed of dynamic and static ones. The former is due to charge/discharge of capacitance and other switching activity; the later is due to leakage and bias current. In the following section, I’d like to simply abstract power saving technology in nowadays cpu; powering saving technology in nowadays OS; what’s missing in haiku, IOW the reason why I want to work on it.
Yesterday I played a bit with qemu and the VT-d/IOMMU extension. The Vt-d extension present in many modern processors allows you to forward a PCI-device directly to your virtual machine so you can access it from the virtual machine as if it were a real device. This can be very helpful to develop drivers for PCI-devices without having to reboot the whole computer all the time. For example in my PC I use my Intel-onboard graphic as my main graphics card but I also have a Radeon in the PCI-express slot so I tried to forward it to my Haiku VM and it was more or less successful ;).
As this was one of the smallest BeGeistert meetings, this report
will be quite short as well...
I arrived at the airport on Saturday morning at about 9:15 and
made it to the nice location at Düsseldorf's youth hostel at 10
o'clock. After weeks with temperatures up to 20 °C, the good weather
took a day off and I made the 10 minute walk from the station
"Luegplatz" to the hostel in a very fine drizzle and shivering 10 °C...
As part of my work at the University of Auckland (which is drawing to a close soon) I have been looking at Java on Haiku. There is already some support for Java on Haiku. By running installoptionalpackage DevelopmentJava you can get the JamVM java virtual machine, GNU Classpath (including gjar, gjavah and maybe some other utilities), and ecj (the Eclipse Java compiler, which is written in Java). This is enough to run and compile basic Java apps.
As was announced a little while ago, I recently got the opportunity to travel to Auckland, New Zealand to do some Computer Science research at the University of Auckland (UoA) with Christof Lutteroth and Gerald Weber (two professors here). Actually, it’s not so much ‘recently’ as it is ‘currently’, since I’m still here! Christof has been interested in Haiku for a while, and has already done some research using Haiku. Stack and Tile, for instance, started as a research project here, as did the BALMLayout layout class.
I’m writing this to inform a broader audience of what was/is going on with my Haiku contract work.
A short post about something that’s not really documented. When working on a communication application for Haiku, I needed to create a typical configuration wizard window. I required a few views to be present in one spot, with only one being shown at the same time - with the ability to switch between them on user Next/Prev button press. Since Haiku exports a neat layout API, I wanted to use one of those if only possible. And then I found the BCardLayout.
