Haiku activity report - May 2021

Hello, it’s time for the May activity report!

Before starting the report, we would like to thank our donors for their donations. Your donations help us cover our expenses and help us reach our goal to hire people to work on Haiku full-time. We would also like to thank all the community for their countless hours of effort of implementing new features, triaging bugs, translating, supporting other users, and spreading the Haiku word all around.

This report covers revisions hrev55070-hrev55129.

Source code cleanup

mt is still hard at work fixing bugs found by various static analysis tools. This month he fixed various format strings in userlandfs BeOS filesystem driver support, as well as a misaligned structure in cpu.h, and multiple definition of functions in various places.

kallisti5 added some debug traces to the NFS4 filesystem driver to help investigate bug reports related to it.

Build system

extrowerk made some fixes to the configure script.

PulkoMandy updated the repository of packages used to build Haiku images. This is a mirror of some packages from the Haikuports repository, at fixed versions to avoid build breakages caused by too frequent haikuports updates.

AlwaysLivid updated some of our example dockerfiles which show how to set up an environment for building Haiku or for cross-compiling applications from Linux.

User interface

nephele added a new method to BControlLook to get the scrollbar width. This will be used for example in HaikuWebKit, which draws its own scrollbars, to keep the size synchronized with native applications. Until now, this required having a real BScrollBar to compute the correct width.

The scrollbar width is adjusted according to the font size (as it already was), but now, different control look implementations can decide to have different rules for how wide a scrollbar should be.

John Scipione is still working on improving our BTextView implementation, and made some changes to StyledEdit to fix some issues with the text area management there.

nephele added a large font for the KDL console, which is enabled automatically on high resolution displays (more than 1080p) where the default font is likely to be too small. The new font is Spleen, an open source monospace bitmap font designed by Frederic Cambus.

System libraries and security

korli implemented stack protection support in Haiku (currently disabled by default, configurable at compile time). The idea of stack protection is to insert some markers in the stack, whenever a function is called. When the function exits, there is a check to make sure the marker was not overwritten.

This can catch some buffer overflow bugs (although it would be more helpful for this on architectures where the stack grows towards higher addresses), but is mostly used for detecting malicious code trying to inject itself into the system by exploiting bugs in a clever way.

korli also fixed a case where we accidentally allow kernel to access userland memory, defeating the SMAP protection.

Preferences

PulkoMandy fixed a regression in Input preferences related to changes in the API for live detection of added and removed input devices.

Fredrik Modéen updated the Bluetooth preferences to store the settings in a BMessage instead of writing the raw data of a structure directly to disk. This makes it a lot easier to change the settings format later on.

C and POSIX compatibility

extrowerk fixed our features.h header to support C11 correctly. This header is used to hide some parts of our system libraries to provide strict conformance to C or POSIX APIs (providing none of the BSD or GNU extensions if strict mode is enabled). It also now handles enabling or disabling some functions that are specific to a given version of the C language.

korli and PulkoMandy reworked the ioctl implementation to avoid undefined behavior related to the use of variadic arguments. The ioctl function is from POSIX and allows to configure file descriptors and communicate with drivers. The POSIX version gained extra arguments over time: initially it allowed to pass just an int, but then it was extended with some extra arguments. In other POSIX systems, it’s possible to know the number of arguments from the first integer argument. But in BeOS and in Haiku, a lot more freedom is left to driver as to how they use ioctls, and each driver is free to allocate values as it wants. As a result, we were always trying to get all possible arguments, even when they didn’t exist. This works on x86 CPUs due to the way they pass arguments, but could be a problem in other systems.

The new implementation of ioctl uses C++ or some tricks in C with structs and macros to implement the function without variadic arguments. As a result, the value of the unused parameters is forced to 0 now.

Networking

kallisti5 added more details about 10Gbps ethernet interfaces in ifconfig output. Now you can know which type of link you are using (there is a bit more choice there than for slower speed at the moment, hopefully things will become more standardized when 10GBps links become more popular).

korli started updating Wifi drivers to FreeBSD 13. He also finished the work (started by A-star-ayush dusing a previous Google Summer of Code project) to implement TCP selective ACK. This should improve the performance of TCP, especially on lossy connections such as Wifi.

korli also disabled the wavelanwifi driver (it only supports very old Wi-Fi cards, mostly PCMCIA ones which never worked in Haiku anyway), as well as the Firewire support (which has been incomplete for a very long time and is now unlikely to exist on modern hardware).

Package system

AGMS and PulkoMandy moved some work done on first boot of Haiku to compile time. This will make the first run of Haiku boot a little bit faster.

Other platforms ports

X512 has made major progress on RISC-V support, with Haiku fully running in TinyEMU (no actual RISC-V hardware is supported yet). This work is currently being submitted and reviewed on Gerrit, some of the first patches have already been merged.

This work resulted in cleanups in various places all around the system: removal of unneeded includes, conversion of code from C to C++, progress on virtio drivers which are heavily used by the emulator, etc.

The work from X512 also includes several other not obviously related fixes, such as simplifying the code in OpenTerminal, fixing of scripting in BTextView, and many other small fixes.

PulkoMandy added the RISC-V logo to Pulse so it can properly show the results of this porting effort.

Han Pengfei fixed some issues with device tree initialization in the EFI bootloader, which will help with the ARM port and possibly the RISC-V port as well if it is used on UEFI platforms later.

tqh is also helping on the ARM work and fixed some compiler warnings.

Drivers

An experimental driver for i2c input devices (mainly touchpads) was added but disabled by default. Unfortunately it doesn’t work reliably yet. This led to some refactoring of the existing USB HID input driver to separate the HID part. HID is a standard originally developed as part of USB for all sorts of input devices (keyboards, mouses, joysticks, tablets, …) but it is now also used by I2C devices (embedded in laptops) as well as Bluetooth. So it made sense to have this code shared between the drivers.

kallisti5 fixed some bugs in the XHCI driver to improve error handling and recovery.

Rudolfc is currently reworking the intel_extreme driver to finally support devices newer than Sandy Bridge. A small part of his work was already merged, but he is currently running a testing campaign with help of our forum users to validate some larger changes.

Wrap-up

Last but not least, Máximo Castañeda (madmax) got commit access and officially joined the Haiku Developers Team. Welcome Máximo!

This is it for May, folks. See you at the next report for June.

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