Welcome to the first monthly report for 2018!
This report covers hrev51723-hrev51790
The Haiku git repository is now running Gerrit. Gerrit is a tool designed to help with code reviews. The idea is to review the code before it is integrated in nightly builds, instead of reviewing after the fact as it was done for Haiku until now.
PulkoMandy,
Thanking you for another excellent monthly activity report.
The initiative to include a formal code review before it is integrated into the nightly builds is a good one. This should reduce the probability of a lethal issue arising in a nightly build. Hopefully the tool, Gerrit, integrates well with the developers’ workflow and will not prove too onerous on their time.
The kernel appears to have been heavily revisited with respect to integrity and security for data transfers between the user and kernel spaces. It is presumed that this is in response to the triple-threat design flaw related to speculative branch execution. Is this correct?
This looks to have been a very productive month for the developers. It is unclear, however, if any of these revisions reduced the number of blocking issues on the path to the beta release.
I`m glad to see that Haiku is in progress 
As far as I understand, the meltdown attack is still possible on Haiku (because the kernel is still mapped in memory when userland code is running - supposedly unreachable but that’s what meltdown bypasses). It was however an opportunity to review other potential problems, and we found some that were not too hard to fix. They are more direct and obvious attacks where you just make a syscall with a forged pointer value (not pointing to an userland buffer, but to somewhere in the kernel, for example).
Watch the “roadmap”: https://dev.haiku-os.org/roadmap
Gerrit was not listed there but my personal opinion is that it is a required tool for sane management of the release process (in fact I started pushing for Gerrit right after the alpha3 release). However it led to https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/13937 so we are 1 more bug away from the release now.
Once this and https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/11654 are sorted out I think we can start the release process.
Just a clarification: showing BMessage content has been possible for years already given a debug libbe.so. What wasn’t possible until now was asking the debugger to switch between that and the raw view, which one would likely need if e.g. you were working on changes to BMessage itself.
Thanks for the clarifications.
It’s good that the kernel was revisited and integrity/security weaknesses were addressed. Unfortunate about the Meltdown Attack as it is impacting all commercial, community, and hobby operating systems alike.
It appears that progress is in a one-step-forward/two-steps-backward mode which is very common when a project is approaching a milestone. It will get there although the last blocking issues may take more efforts to fix than currently anticipated.
Much appreciated report, as usual. However, it seems your FOSDEM report never made it to the front page. I had to do a search for it. It was also a good read.
Yeah, now Haiku uses Gerrit like Fuchsia doing it.
https://review.haiku-os.org/#/q/status:open
https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/q/project:zircon
Next step would be, to have a live status, if the current Haiku revison can be compile right or if some parts of Haiku fail to compile.
Here is, how it looks like for Fuchsia:
https://fuchsia-dashboard.appspot.com/
https://ci.chromium.org/p/fuchsia
Next step would be, to have a live status,
if the current Haiku revison can be compile right or if some parts of Haiku fail to compile.
We already have one since years, via buildbot
https://buildbot.haiku-os.org/waterfall
Glad to hear you are using Gerrit. Great tool. We use this at my company, on our project, along with Daily Builds, to insure a stable codebase.
We even have a little known, but more readable dashboard (with code borrowed from the WebKit team):
http://kallisti5.github.io
Yes, it seems “conferences” don’t get promoted to the homepage unlike blogposts.
That’s indeed way little known !
Does these online tools are referenced somewhere on dev.haiku-os.org? A wiki page?
This dashboard looks great and its contents are easily understood.