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NewsArchive
Archive of news snippets posted on the front page
September 20091 Sep 2009Snow Leopard is out, but the xnu kernel sources have not yet been released by Apple. According to our information, it will be released soon. All I can say on this topic at the moment is, Duke Nukem Forever was never released but Voodoo 2.0 will be. July 200922 July 2009IMPORTANT: Once again we have to remind the community to respect the licensing terms when making use of the source code that we provide. It has recently come to our attention that there are versions of the kernel floating around with a version tag Voodoo; Release 1.1;, based on XNU 9.6.0 and has a timestamp of Dec 30, 2008 CET. I would like to remind that the only stable official release of Voodoo kernel right now is tagged Voodoo; Release 1.0; and has a timestamp of Dec 6, 2008 IST. All official Voodoo kernel versions released so far, including alpha and beta versions, are built in the IST timezone. The licensing terms clearly state that derivative works should use a tag of "Based on Voodoo" to avoid confusion. If you make use of the source code to create and distribute your own kernel, you must adhere to these conditions. As a final note to end users: we will not support any kernel versions other than the officially released versions. There is no Release 1.1 of Voodoo kernel (yet). If you use a 3rd party kernel based on Voodoo, please do not submit bug reports or emails to us about it -- contact the author or person who distributed this kernel. June 200913 June 2009Alpha 2 of the Voodoo 2 kernel is now available. Further notifications of alpha versions can be found on the Voodoo2Testing page (the NewsArchive page will not be updated until AMD test phase). 12 June 2009Alpha 1 of the Voodoo 2 kernel is now available in the Downloads section. This is for Intel only. Please read the Voodoo2Testing page in full before attempting to test the kernel. This is an experimental kernel and therefore is not recommended for use in production. May 200928 May 2009Big news update today. Voodoo 2 port is going smoothly so far, and Intel-specific parts have been ported already. $ uname -v Darwin Kernel Version 9.7.0: Wed May 27 18:40:03 IST 2009; Voodoo 2.0 intel-pre-1 :xnu-1228.12.14/BUILD/obj/RELEASE_I386 The port seems quite stable except for an elusive kernel panic which occurs sporadically, usually when starting Terminal.app shortly after booting up. I'm trying to find and fix this problem. Apart from this, real-world stress test was done with about 1 hour of gaming (Nexuiz) and another hour of multimedia (Logic Pro), and there has been no other regression. Keep in mind this is a ground-up reworking of almost everything, so compared to Voodoo 1.0, new issues might crop up and old issues might be fixed (e.g. "seatbelt.kext" problem is now fixed, and the breakpoints-not-working issue has been identified and fixed in the current Intel build - though it will need to be revisited after AMD specific changes are made). Focus in this release will be: cutting down on even more patches to make the modifications as clean and minimal as possible while still maintaining the same level of hardware support. The most important change so far is in the Real-time clock and SpeedStep support. We've totally rewritten the Speedstep and rtclock support in the kernel, this time the changes are quite minimal. Instead of defaulting all processors to use the "slow" method (long multiplication and division) to support clock speeds lower than 1 GHz, what we've done is to switch over to the "fast" version (32-bit scale and implicit shift), but with an upscale factor (currently this is 4 bits, which means 1/16th of 1GHz = processor speeds down to 62.5 MHz are now supported using the same 'fast' method that Apple's stock kernels use). This means higher performance in multimedia/timer intensive apps (specially games!). No benchmark has been made yet, though the performance should be almost on par with vanilla kernels (only a couple of extra bit shifts have been added compared to the stock rtclock code). Next up we plan to remove the copious amount of TSC related code (The 6-7 bus ratio paths!) and consolidate all of it into one "fail-proof" method: timing the TSC over a finite duration. This is already present in Voodoo 1.0 but we are planning to totally remove all other methods as it is just duplicating what your EFI bootloader has already done. The challenge after this is going to be porting over the AMD-specific changes. kaitek, the developer who wrote most of the on-the-fly opcode patcher, 64bit support on AMD and other bits, is currently not reachable. Because of this porting this part of the code (which is 60% of the entire set of changes made in Voodoo) will be quite difficult, specially because Apple have changed a lot of the same parts in the kernel that we did. There is currently no ETA for the final release, however alpha testing of at least the Intel builds should start in first week of June. Note that we will be doing alpha tests iteratively (ie. Intel users test their parts first before we proceed with AMD testing) to make it easy to isolate and track down problems. Further updates will be made available in due time, as and when we have more to report on. Please direct queries directly via email to voodoo@mercurysquad.com (but no questions about the timeline as we are ourselves unsure of it). Cheers, mercurysquad 20 May 2009It has come to our attention that the voodoobuild script might not work anymore because of recent changes to Apple's OpenSource site structure. We're updating the script and a new version should be available soon. On the Voodoo kernel front, now that 10.5.7 is out as well, we have resumed working on the port and an alpha version should be out soon. This will be backported to 10.5.6 as well. Until then please use/evaluate separate third-party ports of the kernel. March 200921 Mar 2009Along with potenuse who had already been helping, jon.hermansen has just joined the project members team to help with support/FAQs/bug triaging. Thanks to both of you, and we hope more people will join in! February 200914 Feb 2009An archive containing some artwork has been uploaded to the Downloads area. It contains high resolution PNGs, low resolution icons and original SVG vector artwork for Voodoo Labs. (Note that it does not contain the artwork for Voodoo XNU kernel). And a call for help: We are severely low on manpower to help with managing bug reports and troubleshooting. The Issues list has hit 200 already with a long backlog of Issues. If you think you have the required expertise to help manage the Issues list, create/maintain Wiki pages, and help with triaging bug reports, please contact us at voodoo@mercurysquad.com with your Gmail ID. We will add you to project members list, so that you can administer those sections. 7 Feb 2009About Voodoo 9.6: Progress is negligible on the next version of Voodoo, because the people who mainly worked on Voodoo are busy with other projects. The most of the Voodoo/Chameleon team is working to finalize the next version of the bootloader. mercurysquad is working on Project:Camphor, and kaitek has been absent for some time now. Because of this, we cannot give any ETA on the next version of the kernel. This also means the long backlog of bug reports is not seeing much progress either. Sorry for any inconvenience; we expect to turn attention to the kernel soon, as we have some new programmers on board, and we are also planning a parallel project (xnu-xen). More details later. January 20096 Jan 2009Just a quick note: Core i7 support seems to be stable now in our prerelease version of Voodoo. This means Voodoo is the only Darwin/OS X kernel to support the newest breed of processors from Intel and AMD, topping Apple's official implementation. AMD's latest Shanghai-based processors have been supported since the first beta version of Voodoo 1. 2 Jan 2009Some independent ports/derivatives of the Voodoo kernel have surfaced, which are based on the source patches we released. Please note that the only place to obtain official versions of the kernel, package, documentation, sources and all related material is this site. The source code license explicitly forbids derivative works from indicating any endorsement from us, and we request that all derivatives be identified as such (e.g. use a "Based on Voodoo" tag instead of just "Voodoo"). We do not take any responsibility whatsoever for any 3rd party versions of the kernel or derivatives, and caution against using them. Bug reports for any version of the kernel except those available on this site, will be ignored. Please direct all such issues to the respective authors. Thanks for your understanding. December 200821 Dec 2008Yes, we know the 9.6 kernel sources are up - we started working on it a few minutes after it was made available :-) The bad news is that Apple made a lot of changes in the kernel, most of them directly modifying the same parts that Voodoo does. So the port is almost going to be a rewrite. Expect it to take a few weeks. Early January is a good ETA for a beta of Voodoo 2.0. 16 Dec 2008bumby has confirmed that the new Nehalem-core based Intel Core i7 processors work with Voodoo kernel (Apple stock kernel doesn't work yet). It requires using the busratio= boot flag. The next update should include native support for Core i7. 15 Dec 2008Apple has released Leopard 10.5.6 - which means new kernel! The 9.6.0 xnu kernel source code is not up yet, but we'll be working to bring you Voodoo 9.6.0 as soon as we get our hands on the source archive. 6/7 Dec 2008Voodoo Kernel has been released! The source code, theme track and package including installer & documentation are available in the Downloads section. Thank you all for the amazing success: The stats 24 hr after release are something like:
As this is a 1.0 release, not all bugs could be fixed. We'll continue updating the kernel and releasing newer versions. It's not the end, it's the beginning! (always wanted to say that) |
