Hello everyone!
This week is a bit special, as it closes the first year of my contract with Haiku. I wish to thank everyone for their support through donations, bug reports, comments on these articles, and general support for my work. I hope this will continue into next year.
This was again a rather busy week, but there was not much work on WebKit itself. I’ll keep the breakdown I used last week (haiku/haikuports/webkit) as it seems to work well.
Hello world!
This has been a busy week with activity on all fronts.
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Localekit and ICU migration Last week I wrote the report while I was debugging a deadlock in ICU 53.1. I spent some time debugging this and I found the issue. ICU calls native functions to handle some aspects of timezones (tzset, localtime, and a few others). However on Haiku we implement these functions using ICU. This didn’t work too well as ICU tried to lock a lock it was already holding during the initialization of timezone data.
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So, one of the changes made last week (the XMLHTTPRequest timeout support) led to an API breakage in the network kit. This made WebKit crash on starting WebPositive, and I had to make an “emergency” release during the weekend to fix this. While you can enjoy the new shiny features and the bugfixes, you will also notice it is rather slow and uses a lot of CPU. This is a known issue related to the fixes with redrawing frames, which needed to remove some optimizations. I’ll try to reintroduce those in a way that doesn’t involve drawing problems.
Hello everyone!
This week most of my work went into improving our HTML5 support in WebKit. A lot of small issues and relatively simple features had piled up on my TODO list, and there weren’t too much new bug reports so I spent some time to fix those. Here is a quick review of the features I added support for this week.
Hello everyone!
As usual, after the 1.4.4 release there were some new bug reports for me to work on. So the first part of the week was spent investigating and fixing some of those.
- Several problems were fixed in the video code, which are leading to deadlocks and/or crashes of WebKit after a video is done playing.
- A problem with text not being drawn (seen for example on Trac) was fixed. This is apparently a new bug introduced on WebKit side, where small text with shadows ends up not being drawn at all. I'm not sure my fix is completely correct, but it seems to work.
Hello there!
Yesterday I released version 1.4.4 of HaikuWebKit. This version includes the latest fixes to the rendering code and should be completely useable again. There are still a few drawing issues but they shouldn’t prevent you to browse the web anymore.
Hello there,
This week most of my time was spent on debugging. My new machine is running fine, and now building WebKit takes a little more than an hour, which is much better than the 4 hours I was getting on the old laptop. With a 4 thread CPU machine some concurrency and locking issues became much easier to reproduce. This led to identifying and fixing a bug in our BSecureSocket class, which was not properly setting up SSL for thread-safe operation. I think this will fix most of the remaining memory corruption problems.
Hello world!
This week most of my time was spent on preparing the 1.4.3 release of HaikuWebkit. This fixes more bugs and removes the “tiled” rendering mode introduced in 1.4.0, which turned out to not work so well. Some old drawing issues will make a comeback, however, and I will need to dig into the app_server clipping code again to understnad what’s happening there and actually fix them.
Hello there!
During the last two weeks, I spent most of my time working on the WebKit2 port. As I already mentioned, WebKit2 is where current WebKit development happens, and the most important change is the split of the WebKit system into two processes, one for showing the window, and one for doing the actual work of rendering the pages. But the more interesting thing is the more up to date and full-featured API that lets WebKit handle, for example, HTTPS certificates, so we don’t have to do it ourselves - just show the dialog to the user when told to.
