Of course anyone can look at hardware compatibility lists. But, what about if/when Haiku gets hardware acceleration, or other related features? I’d think that some graphics cards that are fully supported now wouldn’t support all the new features as Haiku continues its development. So what graphics cards should we expect to be future proof for Haiku?
Edit, more info:
I tried a Radeon HD 6850 which automatically booted with VESA drivers and the only issue was it would only run at square resolutions. I’m currently using a GTX 650ti in the system. It boots perfectly, automatically uses the VESA drivers, and recognizes the monitors resolution correctly.
I’m wondering how likely it is for any FOSS compatible graphics card to just work with all features supported like it is in the Linux world.
Edit 2:
I’ve since had sevre stability issues with the 650ti.
Last night, I was listening to music in QMPlay2 and browsing LTT forums and Reddit in Qutebrowser. After an hour or so, things started getting really slow. I clicked on QMPlay2 to see how many more songs were on the playlist. It then crashed. I tried opening it again and it crashed again. Then Qutebrowser crashed. Shortly after, Haiku froze, and went to a black screen when I pressed the power button. Since then, it’s been unable to shutdown without crashing in some weird way. Desktop icons get scattered every time for an unkown reason.
I reinstalled the Radeon HD 6850 and everything is fully stable again, although, at non native resolution. I’ll try my R7 360 later at some point and see how it goes.
The 650ti did come from a cursed free PC, so it’s probably a hardware issue. But I still thought I should document it.
The ones with open-source drivers, of course! Bye bye nVidia. Only older models of their cards have source available and that’s by reverse-engineering.
So the choices are Radeon or Intel. Or Arm-based SoC chips with open drivers also.
This is an interesting question. This information must then also be included later in the hardware list. But it will certainly take a while before we get there and have full 3D support. And if so, then it will probably only be a few cards.
I’m also looking for a PC or rather a laptop that will give Haiku a good future.
I read but don’t understand… don’t speak English. Google Translator often translates very misleadingly!
Regarding the graphics card, what does the following mean?:
Southern Island > Sea Island <?> Canary Island, Radeon HD 8000 Series ??
The names “Southern Islands”, “Sea Island” and “Canary Island” refer to codenames assigned to the graphics cards when they were being developed. However, even after they have been released these codenames are often used to refer to the graphics cards - you can find out which codename responds to which graphics card by doing a web search.
I’m not implying or saying you are? I’m just saying these codenames correspond to different graphics cards and you can easily find out which codename corresponds to which model of graphics card by doing a web search.
AMD Radeon discrete GPUs on any architecture that Haiku supports, if there are any available PCI-E slots. For integrated GPUs, Intel and AMD Radeon on x86. Beyond x86 though, it gets a bit more complicated with iGPUs.
Broadcom VideoCore IV onwards have extensive documentation and open-source driver work, being supported by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Broadcom. Qualcomm Adreno is also quite good due mostly to Google backing Freedreno, but Qualcomm doesn’t officially support it in any formal capacity IIRC. NVIDIA Tegra meanwhile is much better supported in the open-source Nouveau driver compared to desktop counterparts, due to NVIDIA’s support. Arm Mail and Vivante both have extensive open-source driver support and documentation, but that’s done through reverse engineering without official support; Arm Ltd. employees have submitted a couple patches to the Linux kernel for select hardware, but their usefulness to Haiku is debatable. Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR is the worst, having no documentation or open-source drivers available.
Everything in the second paragraph applies to ARM, for the most part. Don’t really know anything for RISC-V, except for boards that have PCI-E slots such as the HiFive Unmatched. For those, refer back to the first paragraph.
We have native drivers for i.e. the old Matrox cards, nVidia TNT1-Geforce 7950 (also older) and Intel_extreme (in progress, currently upto generation 9.5 graphics approx: a lot works).
It’s modesetting, 2D and overlay for most (though on haiku just some I think due to problems in Haiku with the main supported colorspace these drivers support). Also hardware cursor should work on some (old style, but I think app_server has a fault preventing use of these). On some the new style (full color) pointers could work,
For 3D we have the work by X512, and for old MESA I have/had 3D support on old nVidia cards.
Don’t know how this ‘picture’ will be in the future though. I guess discrete Intel cards could be an interesting target to get working as well, if specs are known.
I don’t know why, but it won’t let my edit my post anymore so I’ll reply instead.
I tried the R7 360 and it produced a Not Supported Mode on my TV, so I gave up with it and orderd a Radeon HD 7790 because it seemed to check all the boxes for Haiku compatibility(as well as some non Haiku reasons). I now have the 7790 and it recognizes the driver properly and everything seems to work.
At first I thought the 7790 was broken because it would also give me Not Supported Mode on the TV. But it works perfectly on my Dell monitor through DVI. That, plus this card being identified as “Bonaire XT [Radeon HD 7790/8770 / R7 360 / R9 260/360 OEM]” makes me wonder if the R7 360 would’ve worked if connected to the Dell monitor.
But for now, I don’t feel like swapping out the cards just temporarily. And my 360 is really noisy so I know I would never prefer it over the 7790. I might give the 360 a fair go someday if I feel like it. But for now, the PC is finally in good working order in Haiku and I don’t feel like messing with it more.
First, review proper monitor connection (VGA / DVI / HDMI / DP) . Boot computer - normally, you’ll see your motherboard’s BIOS bootup menu or splash screen during a cold (or warm) boot.
Now that you have basic video output from the graphics card… try booting Haiku!
Using Haiku hrev55916 x86_64 and above: Try to boot to the Haiku desktop (or Haiku boot manager)
If booting to the Haiku desktop and If your display goes black and you can’t get the display working again (without rebooting) - basically…: