Haiku activity report - March and April 2021

This report covers revisions hrev54979-hrev55069.

HaikuDepot

Andrew Lindesay continues his work on HaikuDepot, fixing a glitch in redrawing of featured packages. He completed the removal of the custom list class, so HaikuDepot uses standard container classes from C++ or Haiku APIs. This makes the code more similar to other parts of Haiku and easier to maintain.

With this rework done, Andrew is now working on new features. The first of these is a counter for views of packages, which will allow to imrpove the way we decide which packages are “featured” in HaikuDepot home screen.

humdinger reorganized the menus and fixed some localization problems. Joachim Mairböck added a missing keyboard shortcut to open the application settings.

WebPositive

humdinger improved the deug console window to help copy-pasting multiple messages from it.

People

bitigchi added the “mobile phone” field to People files. Somehow we had missed this aspect of the XXIst century until now.

Character Map

An old patch by dsizzle was finished and merged, it adds a larger preview of a character by clicking on it.

Preferences

The selection of focus mode in Input preferences works again.

PulkoMandy fixed various problems in DriveSetup (and the underlying partition editing code), allowing to change some partition parameters of an already existing partition. It is now possible to change the active partition after the fact.

Fredrik Modéen started fixing somme issues in the Bluetooth preferences. This led to a new addition to the “shared kit” (a static library with work-in-progress APIs that are made available to Haiku application developers): the SettingsMessage class, which allows storing settings in a BMessage, with implementation of the “Defaults” and “Revert” behavior as often used in Haiku.

Maciej Bałuta fixed the error message when trying to change the video mode for the framebuffer driver (it now says “operation not supported”).

Shannon Mackey made the printers preferences remember its window size and location.

CodeForEvolution fixed and documented watch_input_devices to behave like on BeOS. He updated the Input preferences to use the new API.

Debugger

KapiX fixed an infinite recursion when trying to debug programs using lambdas.

Locale Kit

Andrew Lindesay added support for formatting percentages (used in progress bars and a few other places).

KapiX fixed catalog loading to behave the same in all API usage cases (the code was not behaving the same when loading a catalog from an image_id and from an explicit MIME type). With this problem fixed, he finished the work on an old patch by Dancsó Róbert, to translate the Cortex application.

Media Kit

3deyes implemented some missing functions in DefaultMediaTheme, which allows to expose sound and video input and output device parameters. He used this to implement support for IP cameras, making it possible to use an Android phone as a webcam with a dedicated application running on the phone.

kallisti5 and PulkoMandy reworked the MultiAudioNode code (the interface to sound cards) to add some checks for unexpected conditions such as a card using a negative frame rate or number of channels.

Package Kit

The work by AGMS to run post-install scripts at first boot of a freshly installed system has finally been merged. This took some time (work started before the beta2 release) in order to avoid introducing backwards compatibility problems.

Tracker Kit

Jaidyn Ann fixed hardcoded colors in tracker “Open With…” window. It now uses the tooltip colors.

jiceland fixed issues with the “less than” and greater than" operators in Tracker Find panel (they would always be “less or equal” and “greater or equal”).

App server

An old patch by Tri-Edge AI was reworked and finally merged to implement B_OUTLINE_RESIZE. This is a window flag that prevents a window from live redrawing while it is being resized. It is useful for windows that are very slow to redraw. You can see its effect for example in the Magnify app.

POSIX compatibility

nielx fixed the prototype of readv and writev which used different types from what is specified in POSIX. This helps with the Rust port, which is very picky about types.

korli added ut_host in utmpx.h (not in POSIX, but common in other UNIX-like systems).

He also ported a fix from current glibc versions to allow use of “e” flag to fopen (translated as O_CLOEXEC for the underlying call); and fixed some problems with closed sockets not returning the correct error codes.

korli also fixed the behavior of mprotect on areas mapped from a read-only file (to make sure it’s not possible to force these areas to be writable when the file backing them is not).

Filesystems

Some more XFS patches by CruxBox were merged. More of them are still waiting on Gerrit for someone to finish doing the required small cleanups and merging them.

tqh fixed a place where the CDDA driver would return error codes in a float value, which cannot store them correctly.

Boot loader

tqh modified the UEFI bootloader to not set the “booted from image” flag. The use of this flag was not very well documented, the BIOS bootloader used it to notify the OS that it was booted from a floppy disk image (for example this is the case when booting from the network, or from a CD). It is not clear why the UEFI bootloader was always setting this flag, when it in fact never boots from a floppy image, but always from a real partition.

He also removed a non-working check for the number of partitions in the fallback code that attempts to find the Haiku boot CD when it can’t be identified from information provided by the BIOS.

Han Pengfei updated the EFI headers from the versions in Zircon, which led to fixing some 32-bit EFI compatibilityt issues.

Drivers

PulkoMandy fixed a deadlock in the SD/MMC driver stack when initialization of the controller fails, as well as a bug in the computation of slot indexes for multi-slot devices.

korli fixed a SMAP violation in the USB MIDI driver.

rudolfc resumed work on the NVidia driver and fixed several bugs in it. The driver now supports GeForce 6000-6200 cards.

PulkoMandy made a partial fix for stalling USB transfers. Now if you have an USB device that is blocking an application, it can be unblocked by removing the device. Before, the application would be stuck forever and not killable.

madmax fixed the intel_extreme driver to correctly configure the display clock on Ibex Point devices.

Kernel and system

korli fixed the alignment of thread local storage areas, which prevents a crash if these areas are accessed with SSE instructions.

He also fixed dlopen management of RPATH (making the way we load libraries behave more like other OS).

Code cleanup

mt continues his work on running various analysis tools on Haiku and fixing the problems found while doing so. This month the changes include a missing error check in BMessage, a double delete in app_server, a memory leak in the Icons screensaver.

mt also fixed the “lgtm” configuration file so he could run the lgtm static analyzer on Haiku code again. This allowed to find various printf string format problems which he is now fixing.

Saloni Goyal, HrithikKumar49 and Siddhant Gupta fixed some code formatting problems in the Mail application and Input preferences. Saloni is working on improving haiku-format to provide more reliable automated code formatting.

nielx removed a leftover debug message about file locking.

extrowerk and korli are working on updating our compiler from gcc 8.3 to gcc 11. This is still a work in progress, and so far only early work on getting gcc 11 to build under Haiku has been merged.

Documentation

nielx added documentation stubs for BGradient and its subclasses, as well as B_AFFINE_IDENTITY_TRANSFORM. Your help is welcome in filling in these files with actual documentation.

He also added some missing documentation to BWindows.