Some news

Some of you have been wondering what's happened lately. I will try to summarize rough status and targets in this post.

An inoperative development platform. My Antec Aria power supply burned three weeks ago and proprietary PSUs do suck. I have two choices: (i) either buy a replacement PSU for 50 EUR, or (ii) buy a new bare-bone case that includes a PSU for 80 to 100 EUR. Then, I wonder: if I were to change the case, why not change motherboard, CPU et al.?

There is no interesting desktop CPU available yet so I should wait for AMD Phenom (K10 architecture) or Intel Penryn (Core 2++).

• On one hand, there is a “native” quad core CPU capable to handle misaligned SSE vectors and that provides other interesting architectural changes for e.g. improved virtualization, cache and power management… but with an obsolete manufacturing process (65 nm).

• On the other hand, there is an improved Core 2 CPU with larger caches and SSE 4.1 support… but it will soon be obsoleted by Nehalem architecture processors with a few other instructions (SSE 4.2) in late 2008(?). In that case, why would I need a Penryn if I already have a Core 2 CPU?

The K10 processor is very appealing and provides a real advance wrt. the previous generation on the AMD line, so it looks like an interesting “immediate” choice. I would then be tempted to buy a Nehalem CPU in 2009. However, I noticed AMD is preparing a new SIMD extension (SSE5) which looks very interesting, provided they also implement Intel SSE4.x, and that may be available in 2009 too. Hmm, it could help to make a better choice if I were to know more about the Nehalem CPU architecture…

I probably should just stop thinking too far away and analyze my immediate needs and solutions available, and just go with them, i.e. get a new PSU and get it now? Oh, I hear a friend telling me: “you should apply this model/reasoning to other situations”. Probably, but I am very attached to my current Algorithm.

Basilisk II. Current CVS includes universal binaries for MacOS X with the original Cocoa GUI from Nigel Pearson. I have a couple more patches from Michael Alyn Miller to integrate and a few other arrangements to make prior to releasing a new build. BTW, the JIT is now working for any 68020+ emulation model and most instruction semantics have been validated against a real 68040 (thanks to Ray Arachelian!). I would like to rework the MacOS X video back-end but this will only cause further delay in the release process.

SheepShaver. There is a more intuitive and native GUI for MacOS X, available in CVS (thanks to Alexei Svitkine). There probably are still problems on Tiger/ppc but I have yet to find such a platform to investigate the issues myself and not waste some user's time. The video back-end rework for MacOS X will be necessary here because I want to get rid of SDL and be able to build universal binaries at once. This means a new SheepShaver release won't happen close enough to a Basilisk II release, as it used to be in the past.

• Leopard support. MacOS X 10.5 completely dropped the Classic environment. However, I don't intend to buy this system because I would like to keep my development platforms baseline enough for testing purposes. This means my PowerBook will stick to MacOS X 10.2 and my MacBook to MacOS X 10.4. This doesn't mean SheepShaver won't run on Leopard, this means I won't be able to test it there. I believe that, if SheepShaver runs correctly on Tiger, there is no reason it wouldn't run on Leopard.
  
  BTW, I hope Leopard matured enough to implement poll() and thread cancellation points correctly. I also wonder if performance now matches Linux wrt. exception delivery, though I doubt it (Mach IPC) but who knows…

• Windows Vista support. I have Windows Vista (64-bit edition) installed on my professional laptop but the lesser I use it, the better I feel. For one, I am mainly developing for Linux platforms. Second, Windows Vista is depressively slow and sub-optimal to use. It would be nice to have Basilisk II ethernet driver for Vista, anyone willing to take this task? I should still have Lauri Pesonen's old sources somewhere for anyone interested… Otherwise, ethernet solutions from a Basilisk II / SheepShaver point of view for Windows Vista will remain the “NAT/Router” and “slirp” network stacks, and “TAP” from OpenVPN. However, I don't think users would want to install the latter.

NSPluginWrapper. Thanks to Martin Stransky for still sending me patches, they will be reviewed soon. The next release will be a major version (most likely 0.9.92) because of license and internal changes.

• License change. Some people expressed an interest in integrating nspluginwrapper parts into a browser. I am not against this idea though I have yet to see sort of a reference implementation because nspluginwrapper is “only” an NPAPI bridge, not an NPAPI emulation layer. The plug-in part, i.e. npwrapper.so and dependent code like RPC/marshalers, is intended to be LGPL. The viewer part and configuration tool are intended to remain under GPL.

• Internal changes. The RPC code is intended to be more portable and flexible (API additions). The windowing system needs to be abstracted too (raw X11, gtk and win32). This means code will be re-organized, not overhauled since it should not really impact the way nspluginwrapper works. The ultimate goal is to provide Windows plug-ins support either under Linux or Windows platforms. Yes, I also thought about MacOS X plug-ins support under MacOS X but, if I remember correctly, NPAPI is undergoing changes on that platform. So, I probably should wait for its finalization?

I hope this clarifies the current situation. I am sure there are more things to work on (including for other projects), but this gives a rough idea of where I am heading to.