Here’s a summary of the last 3 weeks in Haiku-land. Axel was off skiing for part of this period, but progress has continued apace (and Axel has still managed to make his way into almost all of my update sub-sections!).
Highlights include progress towards self-hosting, a new kernel allocator that is much faster and more scalable, improved VMware Image support in the build system, automatic syscall restarts, and the usual raft of bug fixes, stability updates and interface tweaks.
Multi-processor support has been improvedI managed a whole three Activity Update posts last summer before Real Life (TM) got in the way. Ironically #3 mentioned switching to a two-week update to be more resilient to stuff in the real world! Well, 2 weeks has become 4 months but I'm back on top of all things Haiku and ready to once again attempt to provide a bi-weekly update.
It is stating the obvious to say that a lot has happened in the Haiku world in the last 4 months (my email backlog had grown to over 4000 emails) and so this update will cover less detail than the more regular ones and will mainly focus on the changes that have happened in the Haiku code.
In brief: Huge stability improvements in the kernel and VM, syscall optimisations, OHCI USB work, an AHCI SATA driver, hotplugging support for devices, USB 2.0 handling for legacy devices, work on partitioning support and DriveSetup, and new features in Kernel Debugging Land.
Read on for more...
I’ve decided to switch to an update every two weeks, which will hopefully prove more resilient to Real Life (TM). I’ll also start being a little more selective about the changes I report to make it at bit less work for me to write, and a bit less work for you to read!
In brief, this period saw a lot of bug fixing work from the core contributors. A first firewire implementation was committed to the tree, Ingo completed Job Control support, Mail received a much-needed code cleanup, and Marcus continued the initial work on the AHCI SATA driver.
Read on for more on those, updates on mailing list discussions, and to find out how I managed to include a reference to Shakespeare…
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post, here’s the summary for last week’s activity in Haiku-land.
This week saw the driver for AHCI SATA controllers begun in earnest, the beginnings of job control support in the shell (and associated kernel stuff), a Sudoku game added to the image, and more bugs squashed.
There was also a discussion on the development mailing list about “hybrid” images of Haiku, allowing both GCC 2 and GCC 4 compiled apps to work on the same system.
A couple of months ago there was a debate on the mailing list about the openness of the Haiku project. I made the point that there was a lot of information in the public domain - SVN commits logs, bug updates, and a multitidue of mailing lists - the problem was that activity on these fronts was not obvious to more casual Haiku-watchers. I should have kept my mouth shut, because I ended up agreeing to write some summaries of this activity! This is the first of what will hopefully be weekly updates. Feel free to leave comments and suggestions below.
