[oi-dev] Personal announcement: update on donations and good News: Can directly continue with DRM/GEM/KMS without interruption due to having to serve pizza

Fri Nov 20 07:29:51 UTC 2015

Dear friends,

one - meanwhile two - busy days (depending on how to count) have passed 
since I have made a desperate appeal for back-support and I feel that I 
ought to give you a short update on the job offers and donations received.
In addition to Nikola 4 further friends from 4 countries (with Nikola 5 
from 5 countries around the world) have made donations ranging from 20 
EUR to 100 EUR, resulting in  a total amount of 220 EUR  :)

please let me thank you from my heart!!!!!

:-):-):-)
:-):-)
:-)

BIG BIG THANKS!!!
This helps me indeed, food problem: solved.
This is amazing.

And almost half of my monthly loans rate, for November solved (can sell 
more of the remaining SPARC stuff on eBay in December, but I keep the 2 
SB2000's and 1 T1000 and one quad 1.5GHz USIV+ V490 for future devel).

Even better: I also got the option to work as ZFS expert nearly 1000 
kilometres away (unfortunately not yet in Russia, but one step after the 
other).

Whatever may be the case, this much needed help is _immensely 
appreciated_ and I want to thank you all for your kindness, not only for 
your  donations, but for talking me into doing this in the first place!  
Not only does this really help me and my family in a delicate moment in 
time, but it is also a huge sign of support which gives me courage, 
energy and the desire to do better.

Many, many very sincere thanks to you all,

I' would like to let you know that I at first refuse to accept 
Apostolos' donation, because it is my policy not to take money from 
those who are poor themselves (my goal has always been to only charge 
capitalists, but that doesn't work because they never contact me to 
begin with, and those few biz people that rarely do are hence not 
capitalists by definition).
But Apostolos refused my refusal and sent me the 20 EUR although I had 
not given him my paypal address.
I like that!

POLICY OF 100% FULL TRANSPARENCY:
{every single donation ever received (or not received) since 2003 is 
listed there.
That's my approach of fairness and transparency.
(in 2006 i criticized CSW for not doing this, but here you see that I 
stick to my own rules in terms of doing myself what I expect from 
others, or not expecting it)
Even folks who later broke with me are still in that file, and stay there}

Everybody got added to 
http://svr4.opensxce.org/RELEASE_NOTES__OpenSXCE2014.05_x86_x64_INTEL32-64_AMD32-64____sun4u_sun4v_SPARC.txt 
now:

20151119   David Mackay              20 EUR
20151119   Apostolos Syropoulos      20 EUR
20151119   Kevin Stabel             100 EUR&&  job offer :)
20151119   Christian Meier           60 EUR
20151118   Nikola M. (anon)          20 EUR

The good news is, that I upgraded over night the illumos git tip and 
compiled it, then installed the bins into a new BE and booted that 
(typing it from here).

Now I re-created my old DRM/GEM/KMS ws from April and 201[3-4] and the 
next step is to incorporate it into the illumos src (that's no deal, 
only editing Makefiles, but I cannot find one src tree at the moment so 
I rather do it in a hurry).
To get them compiled with gcc is also easier than one may expect. For 
now by disabling in Makefile.init that warnings lead the fatal errors.
Later the fixes must be added of the style originally described by 
wesol. 9 years ago (original OS/Net gcc port and cw creation).

To add the corerct pciid's from drm's upsteam is also no deal, but can 
be more tricky.
The header src format (naming and implementation of structs) changed a 
few times since 2007.
And testing if everything works here on Sandy (or anywhere else) can be 
annoying during devel, because it must be done on bare metal because 
Vbox doesn't virtualize or emulate Intel GPU's. Otheriwse the lkm would 
not attach and hence wouldn't do anything.

The problem is: If only 1 symbol is missing, the next reboot can freeze 
the console and you cannot even procees into single user mode.

As said, I have a basic KMS since November 2013 which managed xf86-intel 
2.99 to boot into X11 mode (only root window, which is not to be 
confused with a terminal window / in X11 root window means, the black 
background is up (what was the beautiful pattern'ed background in the 
past {this can still be compiled in into Xorg, which i personally always 
prefer, because only it is the X11 I love, on OpenSXCE it is therefore 
enabled,  but the new version is still not ready <userland, Grub2, New 
GUI-EFI installer etc etc etc>}).

Well, the first time I did porting work with DRM (back then without KMS 
and without GEM) was in 2007 on SPARC.
At the time I made progress and got it built and attached on SPARC to a 
Radeon 7000 aka XVR-100, but then panic.
However - it was the begin of a long journey since then.

I will require some days to write a worthy ANNOUNCE file with 
explanations and all the trouble I went through in summer of 2013  at a 
time before Sun published their KMS port and when nobody could imagine, 
that Sun/Oracle would be so cool to give us their port (big thanks to 
Ken for bugging Alan Coopersmith long enough and hard enough, and to Mr. 
Alan Coopersmith for being once again on our side [after the same took 
already place with openXsun in summer 2010 <my port of the port soon at 
GitHub, is in the queue for publication since August 2012, untouched, 
now the time has come after earlier mutual misunderstandings>]).

But at the moment I cannot focus on writing documentation or 
explanations or emails, therefore only this disorganized short randomly 
scratching the surface preview.
Because first I want to have it working again. And this time not only 
here on Sandy, but before I release it I must make it 
system-configuration-clean to enable it on Ivy, Haswell, Silverlake, 
Devil's canion and whatnot. The support is all there, the rest must be 
incorporated from drm's upstream (directly from the LinUX kernel). I 
simply need to get an overview and make it ready. Maybe we start with 
limited hardware support for Gen1, Gen2 and Gen3 i3, i5 and i7 plus Xeon 
counterparts.
Newer chips later. Quite confusing how quickly Intel develops new 
chipsets and cpu's / gpu's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock

Then we need testers with newer CPU's for testing KMS ddx and then on 
top compiz on 3rd, 4th and 5th gen i7's and modern Xeons.

Can maybe take all of next week until you hear from me again.
*No response required.* (attention: X-post over 3 lists, but as some 
only read oi-dev I think it is good like this)
*Will literally plug the cable (which is necessary to avoid 
distractions, such as reading the intl. news every 5 minutes).*
Not re-read for spelling errors, must come ahead here  ...

That's today's update.
Next news from me next week at release time.

p.s. Congrats to the new homepage design.
Have always been jealous about all the information your site contains, 
but now it get's combined with a fancy new look and feel. I love it.

pp.s. @Igor: Yes, we get DilOS, OI, OpenSXCE, TribbliX an d XstreamOS 
onto a new level of interdistro collaboration  :)

tnx again  to those who dropped me kind lines and/or the listed donations
:)

ok, nice weekend and till later next week

rgds.
    %martin