[wielkastopa]

Hi guys,

It’s been a while since I’ve last given you an update. Unfortunately the motherboard of my main/development machine died last week, but although it’s nearly impossible to find AMD hardware in South Africa, I’ve managed to get a replacement motherboard now.

On the bright side I can happily say that SATA is done, fan control support for liquid cooled machines is done and AGP support for the U3 northbridge found in the G5 machines is done.

There has also been a lot of behind-the-scenes maintenance and support work. For example the way MorphOS handles the early booting stage had to be completely redone for booting on the G5 to become reliable. This work has also resulted in smaller boot images, and by extension of that, ever so slightly lower boot times. This work will probably debut for G5 machines at first, and then be ported/enabled for other machines in a following MorphOS release. As a reference, the current 32 bit Mac boot image is 2677kB big while the current 64 bit Mac boot image is 1416kB big, slightly more than half the size.

Another small, yet important, change that has happened since the last update is that the MorphOS installer now supports installing on G5 machines.

What’s now remaining to do for the G5 is to add sound support. When that’s done, I still have my ever-growing todo list with smaller things I need to check, fix or improve. Finally we need to wait for everyone’s MorphOS 3.2 contributions to be complete, then for MorphOS 3.2 to pass betatesting and then MorphOS 3.2 will be in the hands of everyone who is willing to try it. Unfortunately I can’t say when MorphOS 3.2 will be out, but I can promise that I will do what I can to make sure it happens as soon as possible.

[wielkastopa]

Time for a status update!

As expected from my previous post, I now have both networking and fan control working on my G5. The fan control currently only supports air-cooled machines. Support for liquid-cooled machines will come when I receive such a machine.

So now there are 3 big tasks remaining:
1) Support for the internal SATA controller. This is without a doubt the biggest task of them all.
2) Support for the internal sound ouput.
3) Support for fan control on liquid-cooled machines.

Number 3 depends on when I will receive the liquid-cooled machine to do the programming/testing on. Number 2 should be done next week. Number 1 I don’t yet dare to put even an estimated time frame on.

There is also a big bunch of minor tasks still on my to-do list, most of which have to do with fixing up many of the smaller, less visible things and then the initial booting and installation process. My ‘minor to-do’ list has about 20 entries left in it yet, with more being added as I remember about them.

Have a fantastic New Year, everyone 🙂

[Autor]

Wpisy