At the end of the month, the main user mailing list openbeos@freelists.org will finally be renamed to haiku@freelists.org, removing the most apparent reference to our previous name, OpenBeOS, that our project had until summer of 2004. The old archive will remain accessible, and all subscribers will be moved to the new list automatically. We'll even send you a reminder when it's done, so that you'll remember to send future mails to haiku@freelists.org instead.

Thanks to FreeLists.org for making this possible, they have provided an awesome service for us over the past 7 years!

Wow. What a week. The Coding Sprint is over and I am very excited at what we achieved together! Haiku has become much more usable and polished thanks to all the fixes and improvements. For example, I can now use Beam to read and send my e-mail, which is obviously quite important for me to be able to use Haiku on a day by day basis. But that was certainly not all. Read on for a detailed listing of all the achievements.

BeGeistert 019 was held last weekend in Düsseldorf and was, as far as I can tell, a great success. I've been to BeGeistert twice in the past (I think 2002 and 2003) and in my opinion the spirit of BeGeistert hasn't changed since then. Maybe there used to be some more non-coders among the guests and the focus was more on applications; that was of course because Haiku was still in its OpenBeOS nappies at that time...

We're very glad that Haiku has been part of Google's Summer of Code this year again. We were granted five student projects to improve Haiku. But since we had so many good and worthwhile project proposals, we set out to start our very own Haiku Code Drive. We asked for your help in the form of donations, and we were absolutely overwhelmed by the response we got from you, our community: we were able to sponsor 4 more student projects to work on Haiku.

Yes, of course, you know all of that already. The reason for this review is that, since both coding events are officially over by now, I wanted to give you an overview of what has happened, and how the students fared. Not all projects have been success stories, but we were lucky to have found some very talented students this year. We're glad we had you!

After the date has been known for some time, Charlie Clark in the name of BeFAN and the BeGeistert orga team is now officially inviting to BeGeistert 019 from October 11. - 12. 2008 in the youth hostel Düsseldorf. Reservations are now open and should be made as soon as possible. To learn more about BeGeistert, see the BeGeistert website. It includes more info on directions, car pooling and costs. BeGeistert has a long history as one of the most important, if not the most important BeOS developer and fan summit. In recent years, the focus has shifted more and more towards Haiku. Pretty much every European Haiku developer is usually attending. BeGeistert is also a platform for presenting independent BeOS and Haiku software projects to interested users or potential new developers for your team. BeGeistert is a great opportunity for getting to know in person a lot of people one only knows via IRC or e-mail.

The coding sprint, which has been so successful before the last BeGeistert in January, will this time be held the week after BeGeistert. If you are a developer and would like to attend at the sprint, please contact Stephan Aßmus, who is responsible for the planning. The stay at the youth hostel during the coding sprint includes three meals (35 EUR/night). The hostel is providing a small conference room during the days where we can setup our gear and have some fun coding.

Thanks to Google Summer of Code student Zhao Shuai successfully finishing his project Haiku does now feature support for swapping. As of revision 27233 it is enabled by default, using a swap file twice the size of the accessible RAM. The swap file size can be changed (or swap support disabled) via the VirtualMemory preferences.

Swap support finally allows building Haiku in Haiku on a box with less than about 800 MB RAM, as long as as the swap file is large enough. I tested this on a Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz with 256 MB RAM (artificially limited) and a 1.5 GB swap file. Building a standard Haiku image with two jam jobs (jam -j2) took about 34 minutes. This isn't particularly fast, but Haiku is not well optimized yet.

Haiku's swap implementation was heavily inspired by that of FreeBSD. At the moment it is not as sophisticated, but Zhao intends to borrow more of FreeBSD's optimizations.

It's been a bit since my last status update, so I guess it is time for another one.

First of all, I'd like to inform you that I received the first half HCD payment. Since it's a (fantastic) community based effort project, I thought you wanted to know where your donations ended up.

As of commit r27159 you should be able to read data from an UDF partition. The module has not yet been added back to the image, as I'd like to do some more tests, but as far as I can tell, the port of UDF to the new FS API is close to complete, and you can start testing by adding the module to the image and trying using DVD formatted with UDF, or iso image made with mkisofs. Feedbacks are welcome.

As for the other part of my HCD, in case you missed, bonnie++ was added in r26920 and it is available for the braves one, for testing purposes.

In r27052 I also fixed another BFS deadlock that would lock the file system when more then one thread was writing in the same directory. See this for more info.

Ok, going to back to UDF now. ;-)