2D acceleration? Even if some of our drivers do that (and we’re talking 1990 hardware there), the app_server does not make any use of it. Did you ever notice? Did the rendering seem slow? I think not.
Back then, the 2D acceleration had been benchmarked, and it turned out that with our design (double buffer, with app_server rendering most things in system RAM and not video RAM), 2D acceleration turned out to be slower because it resulted in:
- sending data to the video card (a full frame)
- sending commands to do the accelerated thing
- downloading data (resulting frame) from the video card back into app_server work buffer
In particular, AGP was not designed for fast reads, and step 3 was very slow. Hence the idea of 2D acceleration was completely dropped, except, I think, for using the hardware cursor. But even then, most cards support only a 2-color cursor, and ours needs more because it is antialiased.
So, no 2D acceleration is certainly not required.
As for “compute sticks” or whatever you want to call them, yes, this could be a 3rd party project, but I don’t think it is something the Haiku team is interested in. My workflow with Haiku involves a lot of compiling stuff, and to do this, I use a full-size, full-power PC. I also have a smaller and less powerful laptop for more mobile uses. I made them both work with Haiku by fixing the drivers I needed. That’s all you can expect from me as an Haiku developer.
I did briefly play with one of these ARM-based sticks, and I was not really amazed. It was running Linux, and it felt rather slow and not very good quality (but then, it was a rather cheap one). But, if I need to pay the same price as for a full blown computer, I would expect a reasonable set of IOs so I can actually make use of it. A stick with just one or two USB ports is not going to make it (plug keyboard and mouse and you don’t have any USB left!).
The Raspberry is just a board, not a full computer. You need to add a power supply, a case, etc. I would rather go for something like the Utilite (http://www.compulab.co.il/utilite-computer/web/home), mainly because I happen to have 3 of those around sitting unused. But, we need Haiku to run on ARM devices for this, first. And this is something I don’t really want to dig into now. Not until we get beta1 out.