09.12.08
Back in the swing of things
Life and work has been unusually busy these last months. It seems like the more that gets done, the more there is to do. However, I’m pleased to report that I am finally getting back into full swing with Monarc development.
Here’s a short breakdown of what’s happening:
- VM development is progressing still, but it’s not quite there yet. It’s doing good things and coming along nicely, however–and to be expected–there are complicated issues to resolve; and of course my perfectionist side won’t let me do a release until much more is satisfactory.
- The ACPI subsystem is also developing well. Recently, I added support for tracking battery levels and charging/discharging states. It’s nifty, but not terribly exciting.
- Filesystem support is nearly complete, except for the parts that interact with the VM subsystem heavily. This is going to stay in limbo until the VM stuff is stable.
- The GUI system got some attention over the past few days. I am pleased to have a nicely functional window update model, framebuffer management, and the beginnings of the window manager / user application interface. There are also some neat goodies, like window decoration transparency and blur effects that are working quite well with no acceleration on the basic VESA framebuffer driver. Finally, I also dabbled in some accelerated window drawing using the VMware display driver.
I’m not sure when the next release is going to be. I had several goals that are long passed now, and I think I’m going to stop trying to predict a time frame for a while. However, I am quite sure that the next release is going to be a huge improvement in functionality, maturity, and polish.
- Corey