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+type = "blog"
+title = "Haiku activity report - June 2021"
+author = "PulkoMandy"
+date = "2021-07-10 08:53:07+02:00"
+tags = []
++++
+
+Hello, it's time for the June activity report! (yes, not much innovation in the
+tagline for these reports lately. I'm out of ideas, or maybe just lazy to find new ones).
+
+Before we dig into the report, two important announcements (in case you are not
+following the other news on the website, since both were already announced separately).
+
+The beta 3 release process is going well, and there are some "testing candidate"
+images available for testing. If you have some time to install one of these and
+see if everything is running fine on your hardware, that would be great!
+
+The second announcement is that Haiku inc recently funded RISC-V hardware for
+two Haiku developers, X512 and kallisti5. They have both been working on the
+RISC-V port and X512 got it booting to the desktop on virtual machines. The
+next step is getting it to run on real hardware, and, as expected (if you already
+have done similar things), the virtual and real hardware don't behave in exactly
+the same way. Anyway, you can find progress reports on the forums if you want to
+know more about the low level details of this.
+
+Of course, this hardware sponsoring would not be possible without the donations
+and sponsoring from the community. Thanks to everyone who made this possible!
+See <a href="/community/organization/funding/">our funding page</a> for more
+information about ways to donate money to Haiku.
+
+If you are a Haiku developer or contributor, you can contact <a href="https://haiku-inc.org">Haiku inc</a> for your
+funding requests, it can be for buying some specific hardware, or negociating a
+paid contract if that allows you to spend more time working on Haiku or related
+things. You can also join our <a href="https://liberapay.org/Haiku">Liberapay team</a>
+to collect a part of the donations sent to the team, and make your Lierapay profile
+more visible to donators if they want to target you directly. You need an invitation
+to join the team, please contact one of the existing team members so they can invite you.
+
+With that being said, let's look at what happened in Haiku sourcecode this month!
+Of course with the release announcement, everyone has been scrambling to get their
+changes in at the last minute, so it has been a bit more busy than usual (this
+is only my arbitrary and subjective perception of things, with no statistics to
+back it).
+
+This report covers revisions hrev55130-hrev55223.
+
+<h3>POSIX compatibility</h3>
+
+The USER and GROUP variables (indicating the current user and group id) are now
+set even for applications running outside of Terminal. This also fixes compatibility
+with BeOS, which did this correctly.
+
+korli modified the strace utility (which is used to log system calls made by an
+application) to translate signal numbers to human readable names.
+
+He also added an implementation of ppoll, which is not yet part of the POSIX
+standard, but will be added in the next version of it.
+
+korli (definitely our POSIX person) also added some commonly present fields in
+the rusage struct. While we already implemented all the fields required by POSIX,
+several other UNIX systems implement a few more, and it's very common that applications
+will try to use these without testing if they are available. This results in annoying
+build failures and requires custom patches. Currently, the new fields are always set
+to 0, the plan is to implement some of them later. Even if this is not required by
+POSIX, and potentially misleading, it seems a good idea to introduce all the fields
+at the same time, so we only introduce one new version of the rusage structure, saving
+us some complications in providing binary compatibility with previous applications.
+
+He also added the __STDC_NO_THREADS__ define to our header files since we don't
+currently have support for C11 native threads.
+
+madmax fixed the behavior of the confstr function in some edge cases, improving
+the behavior of the getconf command line utility.
+
+<h3>Font rendering and text management</h3>
+
+madmax has fixed several issues with font rendering. First, he fixed font metrics
+for bitmap fonts (which are rendered using fixed bitmaps, rather than vector
+graphics).
+
+John Scipione largely reworked the code of BTextView to compute the text position
+in the view. Mainly this avoids a problem in Tracker where the text would sometimes
+be completely outside the view when trying to rename an icon.
+
+PulkoMandy added the Noto Emoji font to the font fallback system, providing some
+more of the missing characters commonly used in text and websites.
+
+<h3>Drivers</h3>
+
+kallisti5 fixed some problems in the XHCI (USB3) driver, making it better at
+recovering from error situations.
+
+rudolfc made a lot of progress on the Intel video card driver, improving support
+for VGA, DVI and HDMI output on SandyBridge and IvyBridge systems, which was not
+really working before. DisplayPort is also working on some devices already, but
+may need a little more testing. This work also enables some machines to drive two displays, in clone
+mode so far. Many parts of the driver were reworked to allow for this, and it
+opens for support of more modern cards later on, as well as maybe more work on
+actual dual screen (not cloned) support (but let's not get ahead of ourselves).
+
+mmu\_man extended the "poke" driver to allow opening by multiple applications at
+the same time, and to set the IOPL flag when the device is opened. This driver
+allows any application to perform I/O access. It previously allowed that only
+through dedicated ioctl system calls, but with the IOPL flag, it also enables
+applications to directly use the IN and OUT assembler instructions on x86 CPUs.
+This is similar to the equivalent driver in FreeBSD and can be used to port tools
+like Flashrom, which requires such low level access to handle some devices.
+
+The wavelan wifi driver is now completely removed. This driver was ported from
+FreeBSD, and the FreeBSD version was removed in FreeBSD 13. After some investigation,
+it seems this driver supports only very old hardware that couldn't connect to
+WPA Wifi networks, so, it seems a bit useless in the modern days. There was no
+reason to keep it up to date.
+
+korli added suppot for controlling the keyboard backlight on asus laptops.
+
+korli disabled the intel pstates (power saving/CPU idling) driver for Atom Silvermont
+and Airmont CPUs, which are not compatible with the way the driver works currently,
+resulting in unbootable systems.
+
+PulkoMandy reworked the SDHCI (SD cards) driver which could in some cases try
+to send a command to the hardware before the previous one was completed, resulting
+in de-synchronization between the driver and the hardware, and the OS waiting forever
+for a reply from the hardware. While the driver is still not working perfectly
+with all hardware, at least it should now not freeze the system.
+
+<h3>Kernel</h3>
+
+korli fixed some permission flags on x86 processors related to handling of
+signals, I/O access, and disallowing user threads to enable or disable interrupts.
+This allows DosBox to run correctly (it unintentionally disabled interrupts, which
+led to kernel panics later on). Besides this fix specific to DosBox, this led
+to some other changes in related areas after studying what other OS are doing
+there.
+
+korli also improved the C++ demangler in the kernel debugger to handle some more
+cases, allowing to get readable information from C++ symbol names in kenrel
+panic backtraces.
+
+<h3>Non-X86 architectures</h3>
+
+Work continues on merging X512 RISC-V work in Haiku. This month, we merged some
+parts of the virtio driver rework, updates to the uname command to report the
+new CPU architecture, various initial patches to the kernel headers, addition
+of the RISC-V architecture to our ELF handling code, implementation of the
+system\_info function, data alignment problems in the AHCI (SATA) driver, and
+made the classic ATI driver (for mach64 cards) work outside of x86 platforms,
+so he could use it with QEMU emulating a RISC-V machine (a combination that
+may be a bit unlikely on real hardware).
+
+Han Pengfei continues the work on the ARM port. Starting with fixing some build
+failures due to a change in the kernel console font (also used by the ARM
+bootloader when there is no hardware textmode available and only a framebuffer).
+He also rewrote the ARM linker script using the RISC-V one as a base, which
+fixed some issues with the early initialization of Haiku. Now we finally have
+some output on the UART port, making it much easier to debug the next issues
+without being completely in the dark.
+
+<h3>bootloader</h3>
+
+The EFI loader now always include support for GPT partitions. Previously, this
+support was only enabled for x86 systems (and the bootloader was not running on
+anything else), but with the progress on RISC-V, kallisti5 could now find and
+fix the problem.
+
+X512 added support for the J and K keys to navigate up and down in the bootloader
+menu. This is useful on platforms where the BIOS (or equivalent firmware) does
+not provide a keyboard driver good enough to use the arrow keys.
+
+kallisti5 packaged a copy of the EFI bootloader file in the system partition.
+This makes it a bit easier to find it when preparing an EFI machine for booting
+Haiku (previously it had to be copied from the EFI partition which is not mounted
+by default). Later on this can be used to automatically update the bootloader,
+whereas this currently needs to be done manually.
+
+jessicah, kallisti5 and beaglejoe (almost a new contributor, they had submitted another patch in February but had not been properly greeted then, so, welcome!) reworked the enumeration of available boot partitions in the EFI
+bootloader, which in some cases would find several partitions, but not manage
+to decide which one to boot from. This was a long running problem and in fact
+pre-dates the beta 2 release. tqh was also involved previously in reworking
+various parts of the code to simplify it, and these last few commits completed
+the work.
+
+jessicah also modified the bootloader to always put the bootsplash icons at the same
+position. Before this change, the official bootloader (with the Haiku logo) and
+test builds (not using the logo) would align the icons differently. When using
+mismatched kernels and bootloaders, this would result in a glitch with misaligned
+icons. Not anymore!
+
+<h3>File Systems</h3>
+
+The ongoing GSoC project about XFS is going well, and finally all the remaning
+patches from the previous years have been finalized and merged. The next phase
+of the GSoC project will be on doing new development on access to filesystem
+attributes, and then start the work on write support.
+
+korli fixed handling of inodes with "metadata checksum" in the ext2/3/4 filesystem.
+These inodes have a checksum covering more bytes than is the default in ext2.
+The implementation in Haiku didn't agree with the Linux one on how much data should be used.
+
+<h3>Applications and user interface</h3>
+
+Jessica Tallon made her first contributions (welcome!) with automatic resizing
+of the HaikuDepot screenshot window to always match the screenshot size, and
+also added support for playing webradios from m3u playlists in MediaPlayer.
+
+madmax fixed the scrolling of large menus that don't fit on screen, as well
+as computation of the width of items in the menus.
+
+korli fixed TextSearch to not attempt to open directories as files and search
+for text in them.
+
+nielx fixed problems with the recently added i18n (language translation) support
+in the Cortex application (which is a bit specific because it reuses some strings
+many times from different add-ons, and we didn't want translators to re-translate
+them multiple times).
+
+CodeForEvolution added an animated icon to the shutdown dialog when waiting for
+applications to terminate. This was one of the nice little details from the BeOS
+user interface that had been missing in Haiku for a long time.
+
+apl-haiku continues his work on HaikuDepot, and moved several tasks to background
+threads, to provide a more smooth running experience to users.
+
+<h3>Documentation</h3>
+
+John Scipione updated the documentation for BTextView with a general class overview.
+
+AlwaysLivid updated the README to include a "getting involved" link. This is part
+of a much larger ongoing work to completely reorganize the website and more clearly
+separate user oriented and developer oriented documentation, to facilitate onboarding
+of both new users and new developers.
+
+<h3>Sourcecode cleanup</h3>
+
+mt continues his work on running Haiku code through various static analyzers to
+find and fix problems. This month the work includes removing some "set but never
+used" variables, fixing some printf format strings, and correcting invalid
+ASSERT calls in the gutenprint printer driver. He also fixed the
+build in DEBUG mode for the new libnetservices library (providing an updated version
+of our HTTP APIs).
+
+AlwaysLivid removed a copy of the libunwind code that had been added to Haiku but
+never used for anything.
+
+David Sebek (another new contributor, welcome!) fixed some format string problems
+in devfs when built in debug mode. This is part of a larger patch series to fix
+"trim" support on SATA disks, the other parts are still being reviewed on Gerrit.
+
+<h3>Media</h3>
+
+PulkoMandy reverted an old change that broke listing of audio and video formats
+in the Media Kit. This restored support for Youtube video playbacks (and unfortunately,
+it is still possible to crash app\_server by playing a video in Youtube).
+
+mt modified the cddb lookup tool (which allows to get album and track names online
+for audio CDs) to point to a new online database, since the previously used freedb
+is now offline.
+
+CodeForEvolution added MIME types for Markdown files and fixed some other minor
+issues in the MIME database.
+
+<h3>Buildsystem</h3>
+
+The usual work around a new release was done by kallisti5 (the release manager for the
+upcoming beta3 release): updating the version reported in our system headers,
+increasing the release image size to fit everything in, and switching our
+package repositories to a new, less confusing identifier. Historically, repositories
+were identified by their URL, but this proved problematic when attempting to set
+up repository mirrors. The identifier and URL had been separated before the
+beta2 release, but, in order to provide a smooth upgrade path to beta1 users,
+the distincion had not been put into full use yet, and the identifier was still
+an HTTP URL. It is now instead a "tag:" URI, following IETF best practises on
+the matter.
+
+jessicah replaced the use of mtools in building the EFI bootable images with our
+own tool fatshell. This reduces our dependencies to uncommon 3rd party tools,
+making Haiku easier to build on more platforms.
+
+<h3>Networking</h3>
+
+PulkoMandy fixed a bug in handling of HEAD requests and 204 responses in the HTTP
+client. Both of these are special because the response has only headers and no
+contents. The code was a bit confused about that and would return an error when
+in fact, everything was fine. In particular, this made it impossible to load
+some pages on the Gerrit code review tool, which is a bit annoying since that is
+the main place where we handle patches and code review.
+
+The web browser was finally updated to a more recent WebKit release. This was
+made possible because the buildbots for creating haikuports packages are now
+running a pre-release version of beta3. This was needed to build the latest versions
+of WebKit, which rely on new APIs in the app\_server not yet available in beta 2.
+
+This new WebKit version has some known regressions, that will be fixed in a later
+update (some are already fixed thanks to the work of jessicah, nephele and PulkoMandy
+to investigate the problems, but one important issue remains with text sometimes
+completely disappearing from webpages).