Haiku Down Under is on tomorrow. It is a web conference -- as in you don't have to be physically anywhere.

Australian Haiku Users and Developers Conference 2010 at-a-glance

• When: Sunday 22nd August, 2010 - 9AM (GMT +10) | World Timezones
• Where: Online + Limited VIP Seating
• Registration and chat: via IRC at #haiku-au channel on Freenode
• Website: http://haikudownunder.com
• Live video stream: http://ustream.tv/channel/haiku-down-under-2010
• Videos of past HDU events: HDU 2008 | HDU 2009
• Photo gallery: http://haikudownunder.com/index.php?Gallery&album=1

Schedule

09:00AM - 09:05AM - Registration via IRC Channel
09:05AM - 09:20AM - Introduction / Session 1 - State of Haiku
09:20AM - 09:50AM - Session 2 - I am a GUI. Like my father before me.
09:50AM - 10:05AM - Session 3 - Haiku in Action III: Part 1 - The Web Experience
10:05AM - 10:15AM - Session 4 - Open Slot
10:15AM - 10:25AM - Session 5 - Open Slot
10:25AM - 10:35AM - Session 6 - QT: New Ways to Motivate Them
10:35AM - 10:50AM - Session 7 - Haiku in Action III: Part 2 - The GUI Experience
10:50AM - 11:00AM - Session 8 - Project Rhino
11:00AM - 12:00PM - Session 9 - netPanzer Face Off (Open to Everyone)
12:00PM - 01:00PM - Conference Wrap Up - Time for Pizza and Free Discussion

Note: I nicked the image and half of this stuff directly from the Haikuzone.net article.

Better a little late than never - linux.conf.au is now in the call for papers stage. Go to http://lca2011.linux.org.au and sign in and submit an abstract! If you have not submitted a paper or spoken at LCA before then there is plenty of information under the Programme menu.

In 2010 there will be an additional way to present at LCA! Posters are an easy way to interest and educate people about whatever project or subject you want.

See This Link for an explanation on exactly what a Poster is if you have never heard of this style of presentation before. Simple to prepare and easy to present!

I have also caught wind of Haiku Down Under 2010 which is a "Virtual Conference" based around Haiku OS. It is on 22nd of August - see the site for details. The past year has been very exciting for the Haiku community and there is a bunch of other cool stuff currently in the works such as WPA encryption for wireless and Linux Kernel Library porting to allow diverse filesystem compatibility just to name a few.

I watch the Haiku-development mailing list as occasionally there is some quite interesting and informative posts.

Yesterday a tentative GSOC student asked about the current status of Gallium3D hardware accellerated grahpics support in Haiku. A developer called Zenja Solaja replied with an informative and exciting status update.

I've actually started porting the Nouveau Linux HW driver, going by the way
of designing a linux compatibility layer for video drivers.

At the moment, the following is done:
- Entire Nouveau Linux driver compiles and links with no warnings (via
compatibility layer)
- Haiku version of mini-DRM (linked to Haiku kernel) compiles and links with
no warnings.  By Mini-DRM is subset needed to compile Nouveau driver.
- Haiku accelerant for the Nouveau driver is done (minimal 2D support for
now, set/display mode etc)*
- TTM (another memory manager for graphics card resources) is 20% ported -
when this is done, then the whole stack should come alive.
- GEM is implemented via TTM wrapper.

The nasty thing about the video stack port I'm doing is that I cannot do an
integration test until all the components are done.  I expect that
everything should come together once the TTM port is done.

Once all of the above is complete, then it should be trivial to wrap the
Nouveau Gallium 3D driver to the Haiku accelerant calls (which calls the
Nouveau driver via DRM - in our case, via the accelarant).

Since I'm building a driver compatibility interface, I dont forsee any
problems porting the RadeonHD driver as well.

PS. I've actually been working on this for the last couple of weeks full
time (with a couple of high priority interruptions, but thats normal I
guess).

Maybe this is old news, but as I have been a little out of the Haiku loop lately this is new to me.

This fairly short email has a number of interesting points. Firstly it mentions a Linux driver compatibility layer, which is no mean feat to pull off due to the dynamic nature (*cough* instability of ABI *cough*) of Linux drivers but this is definitely not the first port of alien infrastructure to Haiku. The networking stack is sourced from FreeBSD and the Wifi drivers are also ported from FreeBSD thanks larely to the great work of Colin Günther who also driving forward with WPA support. As it stands Haiku has a FreeBSD compatibility layer (view relevant SVN here) and this has been great for networking in Haiku. FreeBSD has a Linux compatibility layer but I have no idea how it is implemented or if it too can be ported across.

The amount of work that would have gone into getting the entire Nouveau driver plus a decent portion of TTM, GEM ported must have meant many nights of research and debugging.

Zenja also mentions that he is creating a Linux driver "compatibility interface" so that ATi drivers can be ported (which he seems to think will be relitively easy). I would speculate that if the compatibility interface is written in a sufficiently extensibile and generic manner this could open the doors for other non-graphics Linux drivers.

There is some bloody talented developers in the Haiku community who I find very inspiring. I really need to get stuck into C++ so I can go work with them, but at the moment all I can really do is donate to Haikuware Bounties and advocate the promising project!