commit: 438d5c15d078b4240c7305b57bf2ee7bff9a82c4
parent 5ed6c4fa684e39af00e9dc7c6c98e447d1c0afb3
Author: Drew DeVault <sir@cmpwn.com>
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2022 12:34:29 +0200
status update
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diff --git a/content/blog/Status-update-June-2022.md b/content/blog/Status-update-June-2022.md
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+---
+title: Status update, June 2022
+date: 2022-06-15
+---
+
+Hello again! I would like to open this post by acknowledging the response to my
+earlier post, "bleh". Since it was published, I have received several hundred
+emails expressing support and kindness. I initially tried to provide these with
+thoughtful replies, then shorter replies, then I had to stop replying at all,
+but I did read every one. Thank you, everyone, for sending these. I appreciate
+it very much, and it means a lot to me.
+
+I have actually had a lot more fun programming this month than usual, since I
+decided to spend more time on experimental and interesting projects and less
+time on routine maintenance or long-term developments. So, the feature you've
+been waiting for in SourceHut might be delayed, but in return, there's cool
+progress on the projects that you didn't even know you were waiting for. Of
+course, the SourceHut workload never dips below a dull roar, as I have to attend
+to business matters and customer support promptly, and keep a handle on the
+patch queue, and the other SourceHut staff and contributors are always hard at
+work — so there'll be plenty to discuss in the "what's cooking" later.
+
+The bulk of my focus has been on the Helios kernel this month, a project [I
+introduced][helios] a couple of days ago. I spent a lot of time furiously
+refactoring, reworking the existing kernel code for evalutaing features like
+page allocation and virtual address space management into capability-oriented
+kernel services that can be provided to userspace, then overhauling our startup
+code to provision a useful set of capabilities for the init process to take
+advantage of. I also implemented x86\_64 I/O port services, which allowed for
+the first few drivers to be written in userspace — serial ports and simple
+VBE graphics. We also got interrupts working properly and brought up the PIT,
+which is another major step towards multi-tasking. I also implemented a new
+syscall ABI with error handling, and refactored a lot of the arch-specific code
+to make new ports easier. The kernel is in a much better state now than it was a
+month ago (and to think it's only three months old!).
+
+[helios]: https://drewdevault.com/2022/06/13/helios.html
+
+
+
+There was also a lot of progress on [Himitsu], which I plan on presenting in a
+video and blog post in a few days time. The Firefox add-on actually works now
+(though some features remain to be done), and Alexey Yerin fixed several
+important bugs and contributed several new features. The user is now prompted to
+consent before deleting keys, and we have a new GTK+ prompter written in Python,
+which is much more reliable and feature-full thanks to Martijn Braam's help
+(rewriting it in C again is a long-term TODO item for any interested
+contributor). I also made some progress towards what will ultimately become
+full-disk encryption support.
+
+[Himitsu]: https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/himitsu
+
+
+
+Hare also enjoyed many improvements this month. We have some new improvements to
+date/time support, including fixes for Martian time ;) I also mostly implemented
+cross-compiling, which you can try out with `hare build -t riscv64` or something
+similar. The major outstanding pain point here is that the Hare cache is not
+arch-aware, so you need to `rm -rf ~/.cache/hare` each time you switch
+architectures for now. We now have complex number support, as well as
+improvements to enconding::json and net::uri.
+
+
+
+That's all for today. Until next time!
