Welcome to the activity report for February 2019. This month has been quite busy for me with the annual visit to FOSDEM (read the report), and managing the application process for both GSoC and Outreachy (Haiku has been accepted to both programs this year).
This is epic news, indeed.
Thanks for all the team does! 
Always elated to read more news of Haiku!
Glad to see not only cosmetic, but much more fundamental and low-level ones. Also I appreciate the initiative of cleaning up the code by trying new architectures.
It was a very busy yet productive month, cheers to everyone involved!
Make the new demo Laptop AMD based, people would take note of Haiku running on a desktop replacement. Some of the Mobile APU U series AMD laptops would also make good mobile development laptops also. The question can I buy fast hardware that just works is a legitimate question for people. I think it’s fine to demo on slow PCs also just to show that hey… it isn’t bloated.
Desktop Replacement:
Acer Helios 500
Mobile:
FX505DY
I am still offering to send a desktop x370 ITX board + Ryzen 1700x + heatsink + Athlon 200GE + RX460 GPU to any serious Haiku developer wanting to get all this working solidly, I can send a set of ram also. I might throw it in a cheap Mattrexx 55 case too and ship it in the case box… with a 550w PSU if that is further incentive. Whichever CPU you decide you could keep it would be nice to get the 2nd one back after testing though to go back in my system (planning on turning my old spare board into a NAS). Can also throw in NVMe ssd if you are interested in working on that. Or a SATA one if you don’t have a spare.
Current status AFAIK is that desktop Ryzen works but only with 4GB ram limit set. APU Ryzen does not work AFAIK yet. Vega integrated graphics probalby don’t work, and the RX460 may only work in Vesa I want to say the radeon_hd driver does pick it up though). I have several RX460 available so just holler at me if you just want one of those. I’m planning on updating the board to AGESA PinnaclePi 1.0.0.6 and so it should be able to OC the 200ge to 3.7-3.9 also.
Note with can do this via private message so people aren’t pestering you about if it’s working yet etc… no pressure, just free hardware to hack on.
When did you last retest? Some of the stranger boot failures were solved (at least on 64-bit) by some commits in January. Plus, @kallisti5 runs desktop Ryzen with much more than 4GB; just need to use the EFI loader.
Hmm, I’ll retest probably Thursday or Friday.
EFI didn’t help Raven Ridge at all same exact result with CSM disabled/enabled. Last I tested it didn’t make any difference on the desktop but that was just after Beta1. I pilfered a PSU cable to build the KGPE-D16 box I have so… I’ll have to unpilfer it 
Yes, the fixes were since then; in fact they were the same ones that made your KGPE-D16 panic instead of instant-rebooting.
Yeah I need to retest that also … I’ve been on the road a lot recently so haven’t been able to test.
BeBox is supposed to arrive today too!
Indeed. 32 GiB to be exact 
Booting from UEFI is whats key to getting things going on Ryzen. Our BIOS-based bootloader insta-reboots when used on my Ryzen 7 1800X.
Now , you might have discovered some useful information here… I haven’t tried removing memory from my Ryzen system to get the BIOS bootloader going. If dropping down to 4GiB of ram results in a working BIOS bootloader, that is an important fact to help us in fixing it
Well not removing memory… just setting the 4GB limit in the bootloader.
Sounds like there is a 32bits issue in our BIOS bootloader code, indeed.
That’s not the only problem it has; it also causes triple faults / instant reboots when used in tandem with hardware RAID on some mortherboards (including one of mine.) EFI doesn’t seem to have this problem either.
Switching to bi-monthly?
Not particularly, it’s just that everyone’s been busy and @pulkomandy didn’t find time to write one. At this rate we probably will write one for both months, I guess.
you can write one, just follow latest one style
Hey @kallisti5, are you working on the VESA issue because you’re trying to ensure Haiku works in a headless environment? I’d be interested in your thoughts/progress on this if so. I have an idea for a cool Haiku demo if we do BeGeistert in Pivotal London, but it may well need headless Haiku to work.