Haiku - add hardware-accelerated graphics stack

Development OS
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You see, you’re almost getting the hang of what I’m doing. I’m looking for people willing to help with small tasks—basically passing the hat. So far, the only responses I get are from people saying they aren’t interested and—on top of that—telling me I’m rude for even bringing it up. *That* is what’s actually rude. I’m not demanding anything from anyone; I’m just pointing a few things out, yet I’m being treated as if I were forcing someone to do something.

It’s great that you’re handling the GPU topic now, because I don’t have to do it:)

No?

By that same logic, why do we need Tracker and Deskbar? We could just use text mode—think of how much less code there would be to write and debug. Let’s not go down the path of making everything unnecessarily roundabout.

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I must have missed anyone saying you were rude for bringing it up; I don’t recall seeing that.

You are kinda at the edge between “advocating strenuously” and “demanding other people do what you want”, so maybe you and I are interpreting negative responses differently.

But, in a volunteer project, if the general response is indifference or rejection then you have to accept that other folks won’t do the thing so if you want it done it’s gonna fall to you to do it. And that’s OK.

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Funny. You did that.

And all that just for pointing out certain issues.

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I’ve re-skimmed the thread, and I don’t see anything I’d characterize as saying you were rude for bringing up any issue.

If I did, that would be my bad.

The thing is, you’re not just pointing out issues.

As you said above, your push for increasing the priority of GPU support has largely met indifference. In “just pointing out issues”, that would be the end of it.

From there, there are several ways you can go productively:

  • actually start a bug bounty, with some defined endpoint, and try to drum up interest; the existing devs are mostly not motivated by money, as @PulkoMandy pointed out, but the GSOC participation does demonstrate that there are C++ devs out there who will do Haiku code for cash
  • work on rewriting the genAI GPU driver folks’ work into a human-made form that could be merged into Haiku, or see if it can be packaged to install as-is onto a stock Haiku system
  • look into doing the work yourself; I know my C++ isn’t up to that, but maybe yours is?

But I can’t think of any other productive ways to pursue what you want.

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Sidenote: Accomplished on a few levels… some of us did a lot of driver updates but @X512 brought in the test app-server for multihead display support, radeonGFX, AND Nebula (MESA-NVK/Zink) drivers.

A few days ago, someone released QtWebEngine6 and a Klax web browser.

So, the tech and drivers do exist to support an array of devices. Various people become elves/jinn/wizheads in their tinkering hours and sharing an array of things.

@kim1963 and @3dEyes are maintaining the testing of the Nebula driver and showing the little GLTeapot spinning at close to 4,800 FPS. Maybe, they’ll test Speed Dreams 2.3.0 while they are at it…

We even have Mesa 26.2.2 (latest) ported to Haiku. Nothing to sneeze at…

So, we are far beyond where things were a year ago…even in our browser space…

Just need to seek out the right person in the forums so they can reach into their goodie bags for ya…

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I can actually believe that—it won’t be long before a few people start feeling like they’re in a besieged fortress.

A new wave of Huberts is coming. They’re attacking us. He’s asking for something. To the walls. To defend the fortress.

OMG

Guys, chill out.

No developers were harmed during this conversation :smiley:

And now, let’s head to shore. You’ve convinced me not to ask people who know BeAPI and Haiku for a nice login screen, but to look for help elsewhere instead—it’ll be faster and there’ll be less complaining about how bad a user is for asking for something helpful in Haiku.

Maybe it won’t be possible to add this to the Haiku tree, but it will be available to everyone. So no one else will have to ask for the login screen anymore. You guys have really motivated me right now.

Ok. I understand you. We just have different approaches. I don’t look down on any kind of money. Especially when something I do as a hobby would take me two hours for $50. I just sometimes prefer to eat with a small spoon rather than straight from the shovel. You’d just prefer to take the login screen as a long-term job. Everyone has their own point of view. Either they pay with bags of gold, or let them… To each according to their needs, as my grandfather used to say.

Yes. And I know exactly what you meant in your post—I read it and understood it. I don’t have any problem with that. The only thing that bothers me is that you keep saying you don’t feel like it; it’s a shame others don’t say they don’t feel like it either—I’d love to hear what others think. Well, you can’t have everything.

Great, so I’m looking for someone to help me make this happen. Because I can’t break through this wall of resistance on my own. And I see a lot of resistance to setting up a bounty system. It seems like it bothers some people that others might occasionally do something for the project in exchange for money.

Regards

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cocobean

As always, thank you for your hard work guys.

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There is no resistance. If you want to set up a bounty for a Login screen, go on.
The fact is that most of Haiku developers are there since years. And they had a day job already, because obviously nobody could be living from fresh water and Haiku coding sessions only.

Accepting a bounty is accepting the risk to trade time against the possibility of failure, for a win of money which probably will never offset the one provided by the previous day job one had.

It’s not active resistance, it’s just the risk seems higher than the potential gain to too many people who didn’t wait since 25 years to have their own lives while being contributors to Haiku project…

It’s like calling a product which sell bad being due to “resistance” of customers to buy it!

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Anorher solution can be use bios password and keep Haiku clean as it is (I love it not having an annoying login and I love it being single user desktop os, but that’s me)

I like computers being really “personal” as they were in the 80s-90s

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I was. The fact that you try to hide your provokatuion under “jokes” does not make them any less provokation.

As I have written, I will avoid contributing to Haiku for a while so I can recover. This is not caused just by you of course, but by other things in my life as well. But I’ve had enough.

That’s all I get at the moment here. I try to help moderating the forum and I get called a nazi. Now I try to help with writing code and I get accused of getting in the way of progress. Please do not try to wing your way out of it by "but I put a smiling emoji next to it. This is not what I need in my life at the moment.

If it takes you two hours, just do it. We would not have spent so much time talking here, everyone would be happier, and we would have a second login screen in addition to the one we already have since 2008, that will not be any more secure than the current one, because, as I have written but you don’t want to listen, the problem is not the login screen. The problem is making sure the login screen actually protects you from someone trying to use your computer, and it’s not something you can get around with a few keystrokes if you know the OS a bit.

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That’s the point, writing a screen UI is really quick and apparently already done.

The part about not being able to bypass it, integrating it with the rest of the system and making sure it does not leave anyone with a login prompt that does not work in the middle of using the system is the real challenge.

Nothing here is a quick fix. It’s probably a week of work on development and testing, and that is if no major architectural changes in the startup process are reqired. You can’t expect people to be excited to do this for $50, especially if it’s not a feature they themselves would even use.

If you want a specific feature in Haiku, you have the following options:

  1. Request it respectfully and hope that someone likes the idea enough to make it their priority
  2. Do the development yourself and contribute the results
  3. Pay someone to do it, either through bounties or by straight out hiring them
  4. Generate enough positive PR for Haiku that donations are high enough for more developers to be hired full-time for a longer period of time so all the things still missing from the system, including GPU and full multiuser support in the GUI can get addressed by developers who are paid to do so, not working on parts they are interested in for fun

But telling people “just give me this thing I want, it should not be a lot of work anyway” will not help your cause.

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+1 who tolerates a system that does not use dedicated GPU - even on Linux … as Linux Mint does not offer I can use it - out-of-the-box.
My most bad invention was buying a 8GB Nvidia WST grade laptop card instead the default 1 GB Nvidia WST grade laptop card it was in my Dell Precision by default.

I could not use the upgraded card in Win 7, against that I had proper drivers there, and Optimus that would operate the dedicated card switch flawlessly, but then there were no application that would use it, so I was used generally the integrated Intel GPU.

Not even on Linux Mint, where the integrated Intel GPU used, and there were no solution by default to switch to the stronger AMD card as now I have another Dell Precision WST laptop, where instead of Nvdia I have an AMD WST grade laptop GPU, and no way to use that card anyway in Linux Mint at all, just as installed the intel card is used for displaying.
I should investigate what should I install -if any existing in this distro to enables it - to use this dedicated GPU or switch for specific applications.
For all acceleration if any the Intel integreated GPU used - I had not need to find a solution.
However I must admit I am not fond of videogames which would use heavily a video card, and I am not interested in cryptocurrency.

Using 3D modeler programs may change this, but until now I still had not started to use such application.

:cowboy_hat_face:

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I wish I had the same issues on Haiku as you do on Linux, where the system uses the integrated GPU.

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It took multiple decades before Linux got GPU acceleration, while it got a lot more attention and support from the servers and embedded devices market actors than Haiku ever had. Yet, I mean yet!

There is a reason people didn’t do it earlier or faster: it was for a very long time closed technologies, and complexes ones ( a GPU is pratically another computer connected to your motherboard, with is own memory banks, busses, I/O and massives cores).

Saying, wishing is easy. Doing is far less.

On Linux, it’s mostly when the potential market started to weight enough to press AMD then NVidia to bring support of theirs products to Linux that it happened.

You’re starting to escalate this into users being victims of Haiku project current contributors not rushing to serve all theirs requests (and there is a lot!), like if it’s a customer/vendor relationship here. Even when it is, not all (potential) customers are kings, that’s a lie. Doesn’t matter here, there is no customer no vendor here.

Putting yet another exaggerations over previous ones wont help here, it’s becoming ridiculous and pointless. And can even hurt the feeling of people who have spent decades of free time to help this project to reach the point it is right now.

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I was paraphrasing a general sentiment regarding development of smaller scale open source projects. There is a disconnection between user expectation and the interests and resources of developers. It seems counter-intuitive to many that they are not all focussed primarily on making a complete end user friendly software, whereas they might just be contributing because they want to learn more about how a scheduler works. This expectation is a frequent cause of frustrations on both sides. I have seen these conversations many times.

I was under the – possibly mistaken – impression that this is still not really clear to you, as you seemed to interpret this as an active resistance to bounties or wanting to work on features and so on.

We all want GPU support and a beautiful, functioning and reliable login screen. The issue is just that for non-developers, there is not much to be done except to politely add our voice, contribute ideas of how a feature could work and later to offer testing and log bugs when someone decides to work on these areas.

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- → In case Dell Precision M6700

Haiku R1B4 and R1B5 / Nightly used my integrated Intel video of Intel core i7 3rd gen extreme edition CPU

The nvidia card 8GB then was not supported by Haiku, now I have 2 failing memory on 2 banks of 4 banks of RAM memory - so this laptop is on reserved state until I can purchase 4 x unbuffered ECC RAM for that laptop - I want ECC ti have that if I have RAM issue. Last time it was not obvious, and not saved my config and data.
I just write as I could live with then, and now I cannot check the existing new nvidia driver is OK for me, as the affected system has memory failure in 2 banks. One I could get out, but the other is under the keyboard and other stuff I would not start to remove. I rather changed to a newer Precision I bought with totally another purpose.

- → In case Dell Precision M6800

Haiku R1B6 / Nightly uses my integrated Intel Iris video of Intel core i7 4th gen extreme edition CPU

I opened a ticket, to check my AMD card can be included into the supported ones of radeon_hd driver. It has in the config by its ID as one of our forum member helped to identify,
but by the driver config that ID belongs to another card/chip actually, than mine exactly.
Now I am awaiting patiently to check someone check my ticket with more skill regarding the videocard/chip – what is the solution ? update the config, add my card/chp to the config ? or anyway, my HW not supported ?

In case Dell Precision M6400

When I bought the M6800, I could not buy in Red Covet Edition I wanted, I saw a cheap M6400 its age Orange Covet Edition.

I can use it in Haiku x86 and x86_64 with VESA framebuffer video driver, as

seems the integrated Intel GPU is disabled in the Core2 Quad Extreme CPU.
It is not a BIOS setting, I checked it, no shuch part in the BIOS to select video card or disable video card in the Precision M6400, and only AIDA64 reported this HW piece. If it was disabled, then Intel should do it, but the AIDA64 also can fail related to this ‘feature’.

The dedicated GPU - Nvidia Quadro FX 3700M - unfortunately not supported by Haiku.

Against that I have native resolution display 1920x1200 with VESA framebuffer driver on both Haiku 32 bit and 64 bit as well. The issue is with mouse input devices and not anything else.

Even the Dell docking station works, I had to use to get PS/2 port for the Hungarian keyboard that was found in this flat I am now.

So this way I could write I’m not eagerly waiting / wanting card support for HW accelerated any.
I would be satisfied if a Haiku driver would available for my VGA cards/chips in my machines, and not just a SW solution would separate me from a black monitor and no displaying at all under Haiku. However until this solution works I’m happy, as all games I would rarely play work with VESA framebuffer too.

I know, browsers can be benefit from accelerating stuff, if such browsers exists in Haiku.
Actually in 32 bit Haiku none such browsers, those were available actually cannot be installed due to some package conflicts - required version of one library cannot be provided actually. Others just ported for 64 bit Haiku only.

We need patience - to finally spin itself out – that’s all.

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