Seeing that NetBSD 9 was released just recently, I was wondering if it could bring a lot of new and improved drivers to Haiku, since it uses a lot of BSD drivers.
This would provide a much needed boost in hardware support and thus productivity, enabling new developers to join, and even more users to have a try.
Maybe someone from the driver developers could shine some light (and possibly hope) on this?
No, this has no relevance for us. Haiku only uses ethernet & WiFi drivers, and from FreeBSD, not NetBSD. (NetBSD’s WiFi drivers are mostly outdated copies of FreeBSD’s.)
That’s the networking drivers that are from FreeBSD not NetBSD. We mostly have native Haiku drivers too which are also actively developed.
I see, thanks for the quick explanation @waddlesplash and @return_0e - I was aware of FreeBSD vs. NetBSD but not sure if Haiku could use some NetBSD code.
So we’re on our own with strange Bluetooth, WLAN chipsets and input devices esp. commonly found on laptops:(
I think HaikuOS could really make a great alternative to e.g. ChromeOS on medium powered Laptops, so I really hope support will improve (I might even lean in on driver coding if only to get WiFi working on my Lenovo Thinkpad here…)
Bluetooth chipsets are very standard; they just require WiFi to be initialized, usually. WLAN we use FreeBSD’s, as I said, and they are pretty on top of things, generally. There’s an upstream ticket for the problem you are encountering.
Why your PS/2 touchpad does not work at all, I don’t know. That is a stranger item, but if you post a syslog to your ticket, we probably can do something at least.
I’ve just learnt today that Intel bundles these in a SoC way, interesting…
That’s good to hear though, thanks @waddlesplash !
I’ve added the syslog output to the ticket here:
https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/15729
Seems the fallback isn’t working and the driver is unloaded again…
The only thing that would be useful for us to consider importing from NetBSD would be its new hypervisor called NVMM [0] which is in the latest stable release. Bhyve is another candidate for this from FreeBSD. As we don’t currently have accelerated virtualization, choosing one of them would solve this.
[0] https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/from_zero_to_nvmm
[1] https://bhyve.org/